seasons

Spring Roller Coaster

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment
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Photo: Boris23; Wikimedia, public domain

The kids are back at school today after two weeks of school holidays. It’s the last term of the school year, and the start of what I always think of as a roller coaster ride.

For the past two weeks we’ve been slowly climbing the first hill. I could hear the tik-tik-tik of the chain winching us up, to perch at the top of the slope. Today we begin the descent to the end of the year. It will start slowly—I’ll be lulled into thinking I have plenty of time to do the gardening, get all the nagging spring DIY done, think about Christmas gifts, plan summer’s vacations. But before I know it, we’ll be hurtling along toward the end of the year, much faster than I anticipated. The garden will take longer that I’d hoped. The end-of-the-year school activities will start piling up. I’ll put off worrying about Christmas gifts until I’m frantic about it. Three DIY projects will balloon into ten. Late frost will keep me scrambling to protect plants. Livestock will get sick and require extra care. School will end much sooner than I’d like it to.

Time will compress. A month will be over in a week. A week will last a day. A day will be over in a blink of the eye.

Before I know it, we’ll be heading into the week before Christmas, and my Spring to-do list will be every bit as long as it is today.

I’ve learned to accept this state. I’ve almost learned to enjoy the frenetic insanity of the combination of the end of the school year, holidays, and spring gardening all at once.

But every year I sit here at the top of the roller coaster wondering if I really should have gotten on in the first place.

Repeating Myself

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-10-01-16-25-02-hdrThree quarters of the way through the second year of daily blogging, I begin to feel that I’m repeating myself. Yesterday I took a couple of photos of the beautiful asparagus coming up in the garden, and was all set to blog about it. But when I looked at the photo, I realised I blogged about asparagus last year. I did the same with artichokes last week.

Which is, of course, one of the joys of gardening. There is a rhythm to it. Its seasonality is guaranteed. Spring always follows winter, and spring brings asparagus and artichokes, lettuce and spinach, daffodils and tulips. Spring will eventually mature into summer, with eggplant, peppers, and zucchini. Summer will fade to autumn pumpkins and the last ears of sweet corn. And winter will bring cabbages and broccoli, and an excuse to stay indoors and bake cookies.

There is uncertainty, of course—there are hail storms, drought, and pests—but the fundamental rhythm is the same from year to year.

There is comfort in that. Though it means I may repeat myself from time to time on the blog, it is something I can count on. Life changes from day to day—the kids grow up, jobs change, we may move half way across the world—nothing is certain. But I always know where I stand in the seasons—always changing, but always predictable.

 

Order from Chaos

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-09-24-15-04-00There’s something pleasing about the garden as I start to prepare the beds. I can’t prepare the whole garden at once—it’s simply too big—so I do it bed by bed. Two or four a weekend, until all thirty-two are done.

I’ve planned the garden over winter, so I know what will be planted in each bed. I choose which beds to prepare each weekend based on when each crop gets planted. So I end up with a patchwork of beds—some waist-high in weeds, others beautifully prepared and ready for planting, some already planted. Every weekend, the weeds are fewer and the tidy beds more numerous.

Little by little the work gets done, the garden gets planted, until that magical day in mid-November when it’s all done, and neat rows have replaced sprawling weeds.

 

Ah…Spring…

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-09-12-08-15-00There’s nothing like springtime…

…to make you realise how filthy the windows are.

Not quite warm enough to have them open, but nice enough that you want to look outside more frequently than you did in winter.

Like most people, I don’t particularly enjoy washing windows. But as cleaning jobs go, it’s one of the most rewarding. Who notices if there’s a little extra cat hair on the rug? But look out the window, and the fingerprints, grime, and mould of winter are painfully obvious.

Unfortunately, springtime is such a busy time for me, I don’t always have time to clean the windows. I have to be strategic about it. My office windows are the first to be cleaned—I spend all day in there, and dirty windows are particularly irritating.

Next are the kitchen windows—I like to look out while washing dishes, but not if there are streaks of bird poo on the windows.

Then come the dining room windows—who wants to look through grime while eating dinner, especially now that it’s light enough to see something outside at dinnertime?

Bedrooms, living room, bathroom…they can all wait—I don’t spend much time in any of those rooms during the day, and I don’t notice dirty windows at night. Maybe someone else will wash them if I don’t.

The Last Hurrah

/ Robinne Weiss / 3 Comments

2016-05-22 20.32.46 smWe’re a week into spring, but winter wanted a farewell party, I suppose. The wind is howling and the rain falls sideways. Hail scatters like buckshot off the windows. The power has been out once already this evening, and we’re all expecting it to go off again.

But it’s September. We know this won’t last. We know that, no matter how cold the wind might blow, when the sun comes out tomorrow, it will be warm on our faces. We can, instead, enjoy the comforts of winter one last time—a blazing fire, a cup of tea, an excuse to do nothing but curl up with a book.

Farewell winter. See you next year.

Captive

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

100_3654 smThe siren song of spring has taken me outdoors
Against my will…
Or not.

And so, I will not write today
I am in the garden.

I will not post a blog
I am weeding the strawberries.

I will not sweep the floors or clean the bathroom
I am turning soil.

I am unlikely, even
To worry about what to cook for dinner
Until it is too late to do anything
But the simplest meal.

I am in the clutches of sunshine
Lured away by birdsong
Captured by the earth.

Happy Spring!

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

I don’t need the calendar to tell me it’s spring. I know it’s spring because…

The daffodils are blooming.

The daffodils are blooming.

The office is full of plants.

The office is full of plants.

The fruit trees are budding up.

The fruit trees are budding up.

Artichokes!

Artichokes!

The grass needs mowing.

The grass needs mowing.

The weeds are out of control.

The weeds are out of control.

The wind blows hard from the northwest.

The wind blows hard from the northwest.

The dandelions are blooming.

The dandelions are blooming.

Crocuses to the Rescue

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-08-29 18.00.55It was a long day. I was working in town. At the library. Trying to focus sitting next to a man who spent the day ripping pungent farts, then next to a pair having a loud business meeting. It was a spectacularly unproductive day. I went for groceries, and the store smelled of rotting fish. I sat in the hot car waiting for the kids, who were late getting out of their after-school activity.

With a splitting headache, I drove home, an hour later than I expected, and two hours later than I’d hoped. I took the route with fewer intersections, knowing my exhaustion and pounding head would throw my judgement off.

I got home (thankfully to find my husband was making dinner) and raced to do the afternoon chores before the light was gone. I was ready for some good rural silence, but the neighbour was ploughing next door, and the rumble of the tractor rattled my brain. Last thing I had to do was go collect the mail.

On the way to the mailbox, I saw the crocuses—the first of the year. They were as limp and spent as I was, but they made me smile. The rest of the unpleasant, frustrating day didn’t matter—the crocuses were enough.

 

When Summer Meets Winter

/ Robinne Weiss / Leave a comment

2016-08-21 10.36.07Early spring is an awkward time in my office. The office is used, not just for work, but also for sewing, crafts, and as a heated greenhouse.

In springtime, it can get awfully crowded in there.

I do a lot of sewing over winter, when the garden doesn’t demand so much of my time, and it’s not particularly pleasant outside. In summer, I do almost none—I have little free time, and my hands are so garden-rough that working with fabric is a lesson in frustration.

But in springtime, the two often overlap. My winter sewing list is always longer than I have time for, and I try to squeeze as many projects in as possible before I run out of time. That means I’m usually still frantically trying to finish the last project when it’s time to start vegetable seeds. The plant shelves go into the office and are filled with seedling trays while the sewing machine and iron are still set up.

It’s crowded, fabric invariably gets dirty, pins and scissors end up getting dropped on fragile seedlings.

Some day, maybe I’ll have a dedicated, heated greenhouse so that sewing and gardening can be separate. Until then, winter will rub shoulders with summer for a few weeks every year.