garden ready

An early spring is a welcome blessing in my household. After months of noses pressed to glass panes, brown morphs to green. My soul lifts from winter's dank underbrush as I scoop and spread compost on the garden plot. I move with purpose when the earth warms, and I wonder how I frivolously spent winter hibernating.

It has been one of the warmest springs on record, the earliest I recall of my Midwest decades. Thanks to helping family hands, a third of the garden is planted, all seeds having sprung: peas, carrots, radishes, lettuces, spinach, broccoli. More seeds wait patiently on a shelf in the garage for their turn to be buried in the garden, once April is filed away. Still more seeds lie damp in egg carton bottoms next to a bedroom window, and I water and watch the dormant seeds daily, hoping for a fruitful experiment.

Easter Sunday would be an appropriate sighting of a first green shoot.

 Egg carton bottoms with four kinds of tomatoes, two types of peppers, rosemary, and basil.

A picture of the radishes from March 23; they were the first plants to greet us from our vegetable garden. Now they are three times as big and in desperate need of thinning.