Garden Phase One

This past weekend was glorious! At long long last we got a full weekend of temperatures over 50 degrees and sunshine, actual real sunshine! Bob and I (screw it, I'm using his name, everyone knows who he is) took the boys to Martin Park on Saturday afternoon to walk the trails. It was so good to get outside and to get the boys outside and see them enjoying the woods and the creek.

Then on Sunday I rolled up my sleeves and started digging. I turned over about a third of the space I'll be using for my vegetable garden and planted the cool weather crops: sugar snaps, lettuce, spinach and radish. It was a pure joy. The soil at this house is a dream. Black and soft and full of ginormous wriggly earthworms! It was a piece of cake to dig it, nothing like the hard pan I was obliged to deal with at the old house.

I gathered fallen limbs from the old sycamore tree in the back yard and tied them together to make teepees for the sugar snaps to climb up. I realize it doesn't look like much right now, but in my mind, I can already see how beautiful it will be in the summer.

The rest of the garden will have to wait until the weather warms up enough to put warm weather bedding plants in. The plan calls for two types of tomatoes, summer squash, zucchini, cucumbers, peppers, basil, nasturtium, chives, mint and okra. I can hardly wait.

In the meantime, this weekend I will be laying down a few layers of newspaper and watering it down to keep any early weeds from coming up before it's time to turn it over for the next planting. I have a couple of packs of Johnny Jump-Up seeds to toss around the front flower beds and then all I can do is sit on my hands and wait until April.

It is so good to have my hands in the earth again! I so missed gardening last year. I'm finding all kinds of excuses for going out and futzing around. This weekend I'll need to pull all the old leaves out of the front flower beds to make way for the tulips and daffodils that are beginning to poke their way up. I need to get some wire and make a compost bin, and some more wire to build a makeshift fence around the veggie garden to keep the dogs out. Turned earth is just too tempting. I will also need to put out some wood mulch between the rows so I've got a place to walk. I'm thinking of starting a vermiculture bin in the garage. I think Grayson would enjoy watching the worms turn our cast off lettuce and squash trimmings into garden gold.

And speaking of creepy crawlies... today I got a fresh shipment of 500 crickets and 1000 mealworms. Last time a lot of the crickets died, so this time I have to be more diligent in feeding them and keeping them well watered. The mealworms live forever in their little container of cornmeal in the fridge. I still have a couple hundred of them from the last shipment, fresh as crawly little daisies. Makes me wish I still had ducks so I could feed them the old ones and start Mambo on the new ones.

Last week I stayed home with a sinus headache one day and decided to take Mambo out for a stroll around the bed while I was lying there. He clambered around a bit before he noticed the window and started eyeing the gap between bed and windowsill. I didn't think he could do it, but he took a graceful leap and attached himself to the curtain, where he proceeded to clamber right up! I didn't want him tearing little holes in my curtain, so I pulled him off, but he seemed so intent on looking outside that I opened the blinds and held him up to the glass to look around.

He spent several minutes just staring up... straight up at the blue of the sky. And I realized "my god, he doesn't remember the sky. He's never really seen it before!" And I promised him that as soon as the weather gets warm enough, we'll take him out every day to sit in the real sun and gaze at the real sky for as long as he likes. Poor little guy.

After this long cold winter, I think I feel a little like Mambo, gazing hungrily out the window at a cold sun I barely remember. Come on Spring! Come on! Come on!