April...

 Gentle Reader, if you are out there, please forgive the absence of updates. Don't say you weren't warned: I said from the get-go that my snail's pace existence wouldn't perhaps mesh with the already-near-passe rapidity of the blogosphere... 

If you yourself farm or garden, you will see in this lack of updates the very heart of the nature of mad, mad May as well. Time goes too quickly. Even with the days at their longest, there is never enough time to finish anything before the next project needs attention. More on that in a posting. But for now, let me offer the following as part one to the ongoing saga of "2015: A Challenging Year to Grow Things." Written a month back, when pruning was giving way to the first major round of seed starting. 

“Don’t get depressed,” my boss said to me this morning. “Please don’t, because I am.”

With an array tiny green things sprouting, an amazing draft of warm, moist air rolling out of the functioning hot frame, and artificial rainstorms showering from the ceiling of the hoop house every time the March wind blows, it is easy to allow Boss Billy the monopoly on grimness. But for Pete sakes! It is one day before the end of the month, and this year March has handed out little in the way of spring. This year, it came in like a lion and is going out like a jackal. I won’t say it’s cruel, per se, but geez…

     Still, despite the difficulties, or maybe because of them, this month’s persistent cold and snowy weather has given me a new appreciation for the inexorable nature of nature. No season “arrives,” really; there is a day-by-day change that takes the calendar around its course. Some changes occur with weather, and so know their own timing: Berkshire County maple syrup makers have only just begun their harvest, at about the same week they are often finishing it. Sap rises, or waits, through a delicate combination of day and night temperatures and barometric pressure. The tiny frogs called “peepers” aren’t awake yet; likely the frost is still in the ground where they’ve burrowed, and it will take a prolonged warm spell to thaw both their beds and their voices. Yet other things seem to happen with an inevitability that has more to do with the sun than the temperature. The snow fleas (tiny black dots that hop around on the snow eating microscopic algae and such) have made their appearance in the softening snow on the sunny side of tree trunks and stone walls. The red winged blackbirds are back in the swamp. For the second year in a row, it took exactly even days for them to make the commute from my Great Barrington home North to the Shaker Village (a 30-minute drive). Their first call always makes me glad even before it has registered on me what I’m hearing; they’re as sure a sign of spring as the first robins used to be. A great blue heron has found open water on the Housatonic  River; it won’t be long before they’re back in the rookery behind the cow pastures at work. And it isn’t just the birds that have a clock in their bones. The last of the onions and garlic, even though they are buried under a layer of old quilts in a chilly, dark corner of the house, are pushing up green leaves from their cores (they’re bulbs, just like tulips and daffodils). The temperature in the root cellar has stayed a constant 45 degrees, yet even in total darkness, the dahlia, potato and four o-clock tubers are also wakening, and know which way is up without light to guide them. How do they know?

     Happily, the seeds in the hoop house also seem to require little more than a few warm hours to germinate. The house has no heat, and is too far from a power source for backup electric heaters, so it is impossible to have much control over the day/night temperature. “Germinates best at 60-72 degrees” those seed packets declare—while my decomposition-powered hot frames are ranging from 22 – 92 degrees on a 24-hour basis. But never mind; the onions and leeks have uncrooked and stand grassy and tall; the hardy cole crops are pushing their first set of true leaves, and even some of the zinnias are pushing out of the soil. Even though I’ve witnessed this transformation from sleeping seed to greening plant for more than 40 years, it remains as exciting and astonishing as ever. So I can’t possibly be depressed. There’s too much else to do, trying to make way for spring which happens as it always happens: whether we’re ready or not.