To the Garden – Early

Written for Stream of Consciousness Saturday.

Normally, my year starts with the seed and plant catalogs. They begin arriving in December, but I firmly put them aside without glancing at the contents until a week or so after the New Year. Why? Winter, that’s why. A lengthy, slow peruse of brightly lit pages full of glorious plants, blooms, and fruits helps dispel the ick of a New England winter. I then slowly marked the pages and began a slow process of deciding on purchases to be made early in February.

Not this year. Yesterday I was deep into three or four catalogs. I was putting in page markers so when I order I can easily refind special items I desire. So what am I going to do in the middle of a cruddy New England snowfall when I’ve already run my way through the seed catalogs? Garden planning. I will finish plans to raise the last of my garden beds to waist height.

At the end of the last growing season, I was amazed at how well the new raised beds did. In part, they were more productive because weeding was a non-issue for the first time in years. A casual walk around the waist-high beds in the morning allowed me to pull weeds before they became established.
A second reason was that the soil in them was custom. Yes, the old soil was there from the low beds the new beds had replaced. However, the soil column in each bed had been compounded completely without the generous addition of New England gravel, stone, and glacial debris, which was the baseline characteristic of my gardens at this location since I moved in.
The hill on which my house sits is glacial debris, ledge, and such. Making a productive garden took years of coaching the soil into respectability.
So all the good went into the new beds as a top dressing for lasagna-type bedding of branches, mulched leaves, woodstove ash, and whatever compost. There was barely a small stone in the batch, and the soil retained moisture and was fertile.

So, the plan is to finish the process of lifting the garden.

But why have I broken with a working tradition of doing these things later in the winter? Fear. Fear that the antic idiocy of national and international politics will disrupt markets large and small. Inflation will worsen, and the cost of fresh garden staples will make it hard to afford a casual stroll down produce aisles for staples. I’m probably foolish in worrying that seed and plant providers will have shortages, or difficulties shipping, but that’s the nature of fear. Fear starts as a tiny, not unreasonable, suspicion. Then, it grows as uncertainty develops.

There is so little that I can control outside of myself. But the garden, at least, is within my grasp, and I can make it a small island of surety in the coming confusion.

You have to do what you can do.