Sunday, April 17, 2011

First Planting

A whiff of spring blew in this weekend, and that means one thing: Time for planting.

It's our version of outdoors of spring cleaning. In our seven years in this house, we have ringed our premises with several flower gardens, a vegetable garden and two raised-beds vegetable gardens. Cleaning out all those plots and getting the soil ready for new flowers and food is a lot of work. Did I mention the compost pile? Yeah, that baby needs attention, too. There's good soil there, you know, and we turn it over with the new season to get that rich supplementary soil for the main vegetable garden.

Now that the calendar had turned to April, we could feel the tug of spring, the lure of being outdoors. So, on a cloudy, windy, chilly Saturday, Michelle and I were out there, laboring away, as the boys napped inside. Michelle cleared the leaf cover we had put in the circular garden around the lone tree we had left standing from the area that had been, for all intents and purposes, the neighborhood dumping ground. (An aside: As I dug in the compost pile, I found a metal circular saw piece and an old film reel. The surprises never end.) I turned the compost and wheeled over several barrows full of soil for the vegetable patch. I then borrowed a motorized rototiller from our neighbor, Bob. This contraption, Bob told me, is from his grandfather, and is at least 60 years old. It's rusty, yellow and cranky to start, but the 'ol geezer keeps on chuggin' along. And it did the job yet again this time.

Soil tilled, and time to sow a row. It's early in the season still, so the best bet for now is lettuce, and we opted for black Simpson, or something like that. There are so many varieties that I can't keep track what we like and what we don't. That's Michelle's domain, and thankfully she's good at it. I planted the black Simpson and hours later, the rains came.

Let it grow, let it grow, let it grow.

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