Blogging in the Green Age
by MaiaMama
"Think Laura Ingalls, only Wilder!"

Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Spring!

I've been neglecting my blog. Planting season will do that to you.

Spring is bustin' out all over in the Mid-south. It's a magnificent time to be alive. The generations-old rose by the driveway is greening up again, the yard is carpeted with magical, heirloom variations on the daffodil that I've never seen before, and all the plants that we added to the landscape last fall have survived their slumber and are waking up to a sunny new home. The trees are leafing out--the old saucer magnolia and crabapples, the cherry trees my husband sent to his family before we moved back here, the oak we planted last fall in honor of our daughter.

Our little girl had her first Easter Egg Hunt this past Sunday, amid flowers her great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother (and father) planted on this rich landscape. She laughed and ran and rejoiced with the kind of unbridled zest that only a one-and-a-half-year-old can show you. She's even rubbing off on me. I'm proud of the life we're building for her here.

The garden has been disced, plowed, disced again, limed (thanks to the results of our soil tests), organically fertilized, tilled, hoed, and about half planted. The delicate weeding process has begun... plucking established, pushy grasses out of the way of delicate, hesitant seedlings just peeking up into sunlight for the first time. We're using old hay bales from the farm's dairy farm days as mulch between the rows to keep some of the grass down, but we can't cover the rows themselves until the veggies are better established--and that means regular weeding to keep our new garden from returning to its old identity as a hayfield.

We've found a kind of improvised rhythm. My endlessly tough husband has been doing most of the heavy lifting when he can find the time--tilling, mowing, preparing the soil. I weed when I can steal a few minutes from my day job--sometimes one row at a time while keeping an eye on the Little Bit.

And in the evening, after the Bit goes to bed, we work. Sometimes it's recording receipts for new expenses into my freeware accounting software program (GnuCash). Sometimes it's working on sellable items for my new online Etsy shop, Sophia!. Sometimes it's researching the livestock we want to bring on board or navigating the details for selling preserves. Mostly, we plant. Potatoes, onions, lettuces, arugula, peas, broccoli, carrots, spinach, corn... and that's just so far. The process will continue until the spring is just a happy memory. We're becoming quite the well-oiled machine, if I do say so myself.

Our newest success are our seedlings. We started two trays of seeds in our breakfast nook, surrounded by windows, back in January. We now have beautiful little plants putting on their second sets of leaves and elbowing each other for space in the sun. We began the process of potting them up into peat pots last Sunday, before I left for my next round of Day Job Travel. Before I left, we had 150 very contented little tomato varieties sitting on a makeshift table in the backyard--and that only accounted for half of one tray. By this weekend, we'll have hundreds of little plants soaking up sunlight in our backyard, safely above the potential ravages of the dogs and Little Bit hands, out in the open for the first time. In another month, we'll have a garden bursting at the seams and more starts than we can give away. Barring some farm-world catastrophe we haven't yet fathomed.

The garden and the farm are work. Lots and lots of work. But the whole process makes me and my family far richer in the best sense of the word. The time in the sun, spent caring for all these indescribably delicate little beginning-beings, provides new lessons every time I get my hands dirty. Our little girl is a farm girl, with windblown hair and sunny eyes and no concept of "inside voice" (that'll have to change at some point). Even when things go wrong in our lives, the warmth we get from living in our springtime world sustains us. And when things go right... well, that feeling is indescribably priceless.

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