Well, it’s spring 2009 (No, really, it is! The grass is green and there are wood ticks out there - that does NOT happen in January!) The date is past the middle of May and a few of the heartier dandelions have even stuck their little yellow faces out, looking for the sun. When they finally find it they will report back to the rest of their kind and lawns will turn yellow overnight.
There are certain rites of spring that I perform every year - like, on Saturday I mixed up a batch of humming bird juice (a whole month later than usual) and hung it out on the deck, hoping to heck that it won’t freeze and break the glass jar feeders. I haven’t seen a single humming bird yet and am holding out hope that they decided to stay in Mexico regardless of the H1N1 ‘flu, but just in case they did head north, they’ll need sustenance when they got here. By Tuesday we had a pair of oriels appreciating the free dinner.
I have also spent a day rambling around the yard with a wheel barrow, showing my lack of appreciation of how the dogs like to decorate the lawn over the winter. Anyone who has been past our place knows that the sign reads SKULL RANCH (don’t ask) but after five or six months of hauling in any carcass that those dogs have been able to find and move, “boneyard” would be a more fitting description. When I was done, the yard was safe to be mowed, and the dogs were already plotting how to get all their treasures back before sundown.
It took me a whole other day to clean up my rock garden. This, too, is an annual rite of spring. It begins with me buying a spray bottle of grass killer and doing my worst to the Mother of all Quack Grass - which, I should mention, constitutes wetting down the leaves and watching it continue to grow uninhibited throughout the summer. I think it’s immune. Still feels good to spray that skull and crossbones stuff on it, though.
Part Two of the rock garden experience is when I take leave of my senses and go out to manually till between the rocks and perennials. It takes a whole day, and I’m a bent and broken being for the better part of week afterwards. Plus, the dogs immediately take their revenge over my confiscating their bones by digging great holes in my soft, fluffy dirt, up-rooting my favorite plants in the process.
The next thing on my spring agenda is to mow grass, which follows the “ritual of raking”. To town folk this would mean raking last autumn’s leaves, but to us farm women it means leveling out the gravel and chunks of sod that mysteriously appear where the road cleaning tractor piled snow up during the winter. Good exercise that: raking gravel out of grass.
With the lawn all cut, the next step is to till the garden. All through the winter months it was such an eyesore with corn stalks and sunflower stems sticking up through the snow - I tilled it twice, and then went back to sit on the deck and admire it’s black, weedless beauty. When it looks that nice I hate to even put footprints in it.
But what would be the point of that? Gardens are to grow things in - my work was not yet done.
All through my other jobs I had been going through my annual debate ... north-to-south, or east-to-west? Which way would I put my garden rows in this year? It’s a big decision for me. I’m married to a man who just can’t abide a crooked row. He’s married to a woman who can’t create a straight row even with markers and twine - and who gave up caring ages ago. If I plant east-to-west he can see them from the barnyard, and north-to-south makes my short-comings obvious from the kitchen table.
It’s not REALLY spring until the potatoes come up crooked, folks, so give it another week. It won’t be long now.
