sprouts

Why is it that there are about 2 minutes between waiting, waiting, waiting anxiously for a bit of sun, for warm breezes, and swelling of buds, and then everything in the garden needing my attention at once? Not that I’m complaining.

Last week: yet another snowstorm, several frosty nights, boots and winter coats, trudging through slush and scraping ice from the windshield. This week: butterflies, Creeping Charlie, shorts and sunhats on preschoolers, and worms in the beaks of hens at my feet.

The compost pile needs turning, the garden and kitchen beds need dressing with compost, seedlings need tending and thinning and dividing and hardening off. The garden bed mulch is uncovered, and I’ve already started watering for the season, as the ground is surprisingly dry. It is busy, but it is a wonderful kind of busy, the kind that leaves one bodily tired at night, satisfied from an hour here and there of satisfied puttering. I make my rounds, digging, tending, turning, the clapclapclap of the neighbor kids’ basketball a steady familiar rhythm, the boys and I getting lungs full of musty, gorgeous earthen decay, insistent birdsongs all around us, my whole body leaning finally into a shovel with a couple of willing apprentices by my side.

And willing they are. I am so cautiously grateful for that, as I’m concerned about their someday rejecting the very thing I love so much. I know that a lot of children of gardening enthusiasts grow up to hate the chores and the weeding and the perceived drudgery of helping out with yard work, and I don’t want that to happen. I want it to be joyful, and right now, it really is. If they prefer to play with their trucks and balls instead of helping me dress beds, that’s fine, but at least right now, they love to help with any of it and they also love to talk about it – about vegetables and bugs, and birds. Today, O said, “We have a tiny farm!” This past week, they’ve watered, composted, sifted compost, dressed the raised beds with compost, helped clean out the chicken run and henhouse, and actually accomplished a significant amount of mulching in between rolling off the mulch pile. My only tax has been spending some extra time washing the dirt from behind their ears and washing the stains out of the knees of their pants—a small price indeed. The best part of all is seeing them feel needed, and competent.

After a three-year hiatus from seed-starting, I’ve pulled out the lights and seed trays and gotten starts going again this year, using mostly past seasons’ seeds. Almost everything germinated well, even the seed that were 5 years old, and the seedlings are looking beautiful. The air in our bedroom is slightly spicy and fecund as I wake to the timer switching on the lights at 7:30 AM, and several times a day, I peek to see what is happening. Aside from keeping on top of what needs dividing, the thinning is by far the hardest part.

I’ve read that the Scotts have a tradition of exchanging the task of thinning rows with a neighbor, because who, in the first days of Spring verily bursting forth after months of waiting, can stand taking a sharp pair of shears and felling half of one’s very own perfectly healthy cotyledons? Brutal.

When we aren't mucking around in the dirt, the boys are usually either reading books with us or playing one of their increasingly complex games. This game was called "flying to Holland", made possible by their car seats. As you can see, they hit a little turbulance at one point. No stuffed animals were hurt, thank goodness.