New Beginnings

Spring is the season of new things, fresh starts and newfound hope for what is coming. Trees suddenly burst with delicate blooms, the grass grows two inches before you can turn around, and the birds wake you up in the morning with their songs. Soon you see calves following their mothers to graze, fluffy chicks falling over their feet and ducklings struggling to keep up.

Spring is also the time when everyone is planning their gardens. I always love the planning stage of gardening. It’s so much fun to look at seeds and plants and figure out what to plant where.

Of course this process is much easier if you thoroughly weed the designated areas first. It is a lot harder to picture English daisies and lavender if all you see is moss and overgrown grass. Fresh dirt is a blank canvas ready to be made beautiful. Many people hate to weed. That is a fact. I love to weed. That is another fact. Something about yanking weeds and throwing them in a pile is great fun to me. I enjoy looking at an overgrown bed full of weeds, deciding to tackle it all at once, pushing up my sleeves, getting my hands dirty and then realizing halfway through that I should have started at one end instead of somewhere in the middle.

My mom and I have a good system for the gardens around the house, she picks the plants and I take care of them (except for the roses…those are all hers). However, because of this arrangement I am not always sure of which plants are which. For example, something that I thought was a groundcover, and because of this thought, tended all last summer, is a weed. I suppose my green thumb was a bit pink for a while after that realization.

I am very excited for my vegetable garden this year. I am going to plant seven or eight different kinds of tomatoes and cucumbers. The reason I am excited is I love tomatoes, so planting so many

varieties is a lot of fun. I want to have one Cherry, two Yellow Grape, one Beefsteak, one Plum and a couple Heritage plants. As far as cucumbers go, I just really like growing them and they are fun to watch grow.

I have learned a lot about veggie gardens over the last few years. Things such as, if you’re going to plant carrots don’t mix manure into the soil where they will grow. They don’t taste good. At all. Another thing is that if you’re going to plant corn in a small amount, protect it at all costs. After 3 years of trying to get it to grow properly, I finally had a great crop. I brought in four or five ears for supper that night, went out the next morning and all the stocks were knocked over and the rest of the ears were eaten by rodents. Stupid raccoons! A final thing to remember is that the seed packets have the times for planting veggies for a reason. Last summer, we had to rebuild my veggie bed and it took longer than I had expected. For that reason, I planted my cucumbers about 3 weeks after the last suggested time. Fortunately we had a warm September, so they actually grew and started to bloom and germinate and grow tiny cucumbers. Unfortunately, once they were big enough to stop looking like pickles we had a frost. Therefore we had a crop of about a dozen good sized cucumbers and a whole lot of gushy gross ones. Lesson learned.