In Just Two Months...
3:56 AM
In just two months, give or take, I’ll be out in the garden planting ‘Green Arrow’* peas and lettuce and onions.
It will be a beautiful early spring day when I get the wheelbarrow out of the garage, load it up with a rake, seeds, onion sets and row markers.
Then I’ll look over all the hoes, and pick out one, maybe two, to make nice straight furrows in whatever raised bed I choose for these early crops.
It will be just warm enough to wear a lightweight jacket as I kneel down and shake those pale green shriveled up pea seeds out of the seed packet into the palm of my hand…
Yes, it’s January and thoughts of planting this spring may be more of a dream right now, but there are just two more months before I’ll really be out in the garden, the currently frozen garden, planting seeds.
While I wait two more months to get out into the garden, there is plenty of winter gardening to do inside. I’ve got all kinds of stuff to do to prepare for spring. I’m going to be busy doing it all, too. This winter gardening can really wear a gardener out. And it is mentally challenging.
The most obvious and taxing winter gardening chore, the one staring me in the face saying “do it now” is the task of browsing through seed catalogs and ordering seeds.
Even though I’ll only order from two or three (or four, maybe five tops) seed companies, I look at all the catalogs I get, just in case there is something New! Unique! Horticultural Breakthrough! that I must have.
Then I get down to the serious business of listing all the seeds I want, followed by pruning the list back, then standing back and looking at it, then pruning it again. This first round of list pruning is based on how much space I have, or think I have, in the garden.
The second round of pruning the seed list is more like thinning out seedlings, as I work to get the list down to a reasonable amount to spend, or at least to an amount that I’m willing to spend. Whether that is really a reasonable amount or not probably depends on if you are a gardener or not.
There’s a lot of math involved in this part. Not just adding up prices and seeing dollar signs, but calculating space requirements and doing advanced computations to see if it will all fit in the garden.
Sometimes this part even involves a calculator and the use of Excel spreadsheets.
In the end, I also tap into my past experience and just guess and hope it will all work out.
It usually does.
There are other winter gardening chores I could be, should be, doing, but right now all my energy is focused on seeds and ordering what I need.
After all, in just two months, give or take, I’ll be planting peas!
*I only plant ‘Green Arrow’ peas. No other pea variety will do. I must have ‘Green Arrow’.
