I don’t need the calendar to tell me it’s spring. I know it’s spring because…
The daffodils are blooming.
The office is full of plants.
The fruit trees are budding up.
Artichokes!
The grass needs mowing.
The weeds are out of control.
The wind blows hard from the northwest.
The dandelions are blooming.
There isn’t much in bloom at this time of year around our place. Daffodils, crocuses, a few early daisies and other weeds in the lawn.
And the rosemary.
Rosemary is perennial here, and grows into a large shrub unless regularly trimmed. The rosemary in the herb knot in the front yard is kept quite small, but two bushes by the side of the house are allowed to range more widely. They’re about two metres tall, and almost as wide. Right now they are in full bloom.
And they are absolutely filled with bees. I swear, there’s an entire hive there right now. The hum is audible from five metres away.
I love to watch bees on rosemary. Not only are they incredibly enthusiastic about the nectar, but they collect the purple pollen, which looks really cool in their pollen baskets.
We’ve been talking about re-envisioning the plantings at the side of the house. The new plan doesn’t have giant rosemary plants in it. Watching the bees enjoy the blooms in early spring, though, we might just have to rethink that.
Early 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.
I couldn’t resist a story in verse this week…
A gardener’s life is full of shit
And compost is the best of it.
Now hear a tale of a gardener who
Rose to fame on a pile of poo.
T’was springtime when, as all do know
Young green things are apt to grow.
And Sally, your young gardener fair
Prepared the soil with skill and care.
She turned it with her spading fork.
And pulled the weeds, such heavy work.
Then went she to the compost pile.
Which had been rotting for a while.
Cow pies, weeds and chicken poo,
Mouldy hay she’d added, too.
It made a rick and crumbly mix.
The deficiencies of her soil to fix.
Into the soil her compost went.
She mixed, raked it, then she bent
And lovingly she planted seed
‘Atlantic Giant’, yes indeed.
For this year, she would beat them all
Win biggest pumpkin in the fall.
All summer she did weed and water
As though the pumpkin were her daughter.
The pumpkin grew, and grew, and grew.
Drawing nutrients from the poo.
And Sally grinned as the contest neared.
She thought of past competitors who jeered.
But this year, she would have last laugh.
She had the biggest pumpkin by half.
Fifteen hundred pounds it weighed.
A large blue ribbon on it laid.
Sally was famous, her gardening lauded.
And all the spectators loudly applauded.
And when she was asked, just what did she do,
She calmly replied, “I just fed it some poo!”
Oh, little seed
Barely a speck.
Germ and cotyledon armoured
In seed coat.
You hold such potential–
A pea, a bean, a sprawling melon
Waits inside your humble shell.
Such modest desires you possess–
Soil, sun, water, warmth.
It is my pleasure to provide for you
Knowing you, someday, will provide for me–
Succulent tomatoes, crisp lettuce, spicy radishes.
I can taste your future.
Grow, little seed.
You are my sun, my life, my lunch.
You are spring itself.
In honour of National Poetry Day this Friday, the remainder of my posts this week will be in verse.
Fog billows in wet.
Frosting hair, spider webs, grass
With silver gilding.
_______
Magpie warbles loud
In early morning darkness,
Waking up the sun.
_______
Bees hum in purple
Lavender blooms, blue pollen
Dusting hairy backs.
_______
Seedlings defy frost,
Growing tall in warm sunshine,
Sheltered under glass.
_______
Sparrows descend to
Old sheds, bringing straw, grass, noise
Leaving poo, feathers.
_______
Ploughs plough, seagulls wheel
Overhead seeking
The freshly turned worm.
This past weekend was the annual Ellesmere Vintage Club’s Ploughing Match. Our neighbour hosts the event, so we walked down there on Saturday morning to watch the action.
It was slow-motion action. No big thrills or adrenalin. Just the rumble of diesel engines and the smell of freshly turned soil. It was clear the point was a perfectly-turned patch of ground, not speed. There was a lot of starting and stopping, and adjusting of freshly-painted ploughs.
A pair of horses joined the 1940s and ’50s era tractors. Watching them work, it’s clear why tractors have taken over on the farm—there was significantly more fiddling to be done by the horse team in order to perfect their rows.
The demographics of the crowd were predictable. Before we arrived, I commented to my daughter that we might be the only women there. Her response was that she would likely be the youngest person there…by about 70 years.
While the majority of competitors were as vintage as their tractors, there were a few younger ones. Two or three other children were there, too, though they were sitting in a car playing on an iPad. And there was a small contingent of women. A few wives watched from the sidelines, and a woman drove the horse team.
It was a true small-town event—25 competitors, and perhaps 40 people in total at the event when we were there. Participants were shuttled to the local hall for lunch on two long benches, set back-to-back atop a flatbed trailer.
Later, as the event broke up and tractors motored past the house, we laughed—it was hard to tell which vehicles were en route from the competition, and which ones were simply on their way from paddock to paddock. Many of these vintage tractors still get regular use on the farm.
Of course, I have to wonder what will happen as the vintage tractor enthusiasts and their machines age further. Will younger farmers grow nostalgic about tractors from the 60s and 70s as they age? If not, we’ll see a lot fewer than 25 contestants at vintage ploughing matches in future years.
I couldn’t possibly post a story for Saturday Stories today—there were just too many interesting things to blog about…
The neighbours are always busy moving sheep around at this time of year—there’s shearing, lambing, tailing…sheep being shifted from paddock to paddock for all sorts of reasons. Nearly every day a mob or two pass the front gate.
Even if I don’t see them pass, I can always tell when sheep have been by, because the road is sprinkled with sheep pellets afterwards.
But yesterday, a sheep left a bit more than poo at our gate.
You know you live in rural New Zealand when…
Special prize to you if you know what this is. I’ll give you the answer tomorrow.
See no evil–list it instead.
It’s about this time of year when I look around and see how shabby the garden looks. Through the depths of winter, I didn’t notice. I wasn’t outside enough. The days were short. I didn’t want to work outdoors.
But even if the lengthening days and singing magpies weren’t enough to tell me, the calendar is screaming that it’s just two weeks to spring.
So I’m paying more attention to the yard and garden. I’m taking a second glance at what I thought was my herbs beginning to resprout…and finding that the green I saw was actually a giant, aggressively spreading vetch. I’m walking through the vegetable garden to assess what needs to be done…and finding that though the chickens did a lovely job on some weeds, they didn’t touch the most difficult ones. I’m checking the bird netting over the strawberries, and finding hole after hole that needs repairing. I’m inspecting irrigation pipes, and finding ice-cracked valves. I’m walking the rows of currants and raspberries, and finding enough thistles to make me want to cry.
In short, I’m finding so many things to do, I begin to think I can’t possibly do them all.
And so, to maintain my sanity, I make lists.
A list of things to do this weekend.
A list of things to do in the evenings during the week.
A list of things to purchase in town.
A list of things to do next weekend.
A list of things to do the weekend after that.
A list of things that need to go on a list…
By mid-September, I’ll have every weekend through late-November planned in detail—exactly what needs to be done in order to have everything under control and planted out at the right time.
It sounds crazy, but it keeps me sane. Once a task is on a list, I can ignore it. I can walk past that aggressive vetch plant every day, knowing that if I just keep to my lists, I will eventually get to it. I can be completely blind to the holes in the bird netting, because I know that fixing it is on the list the week before the strawberries should start to ripen.
Without my lists, I’d be overwhelmed by the mountain of tasks to get done between now and December.
But the lists aren’t just good for making me get my work done. They also help me get my play in, too. Fun stuff goes on the lists, too. A weekend tramping trip, a day at the beach—I can schedule these things in alongside my work, and then actually enjoy them, because I know I’ve got time to do them. It says so, right on my lists.
Tomorrow’s forecast is rather wintery, but I’ve been fortified today. The preying mantises must know their time is short—that one of these storms is going to do them in for good—because over the past couple of days, they’ve been laying eggs all over the place.
There are new clusters on the fence posts, on the rosemary, and even on my office deck.
Though the adults will succumb to the weather, their eggs will rest snug all winter in their cosy egg capsules—a promise of the spring to come.
Robinne Weiss 