Impatience

I go through this same kind of mind game every single year.  It happens when I start reading blogs where people are preparing their garden for planting, getting seeds in the ground and setting out their first started plants.  Their perennial flowers have been blooming for weeks and song birds have returned to their spring/summer quarters.  How's my garden progressing?

These are the raised beds at the far south end of the garden.  Do they look ready for planting?  Not quite.

This is a shot of the ground immediately outside our back door.  (The tire tracks are from the garden cart that was used to haul boxes of my seasonal decorations from the back storage shed.  I simply could not tolerate the winter decorations one more day and had to replace them with my spring ones.)  At least the terrible ice is gone from this area.

Oh, much of our snow has melted, no question about that.  There are lots of clear spots in our back yard and on our driveway.  At least where the sun can peek through the trees to hit the ground. 

Here's our asparagus bed which will give us our first-of-the-season taste of luscious, green spears which will poke up through the soil.  But first I need to get out there to clean up the old dead ferns and debris, fertilize with some good compost and rake more soil up onto the rows.  Gotta keep those wonderful aspergrass (as my grandpa used to say) plants happy.  But even this won't happen until the ground thaws a bit more and dries out a lot more.

These are my three rows of strawberry plants that go from the snow covered bottom of the picture all the way to the end of the snow you can see.  (Yoo-hoo, anybody under there?)  My question is why is that patch in the middle free of snow?  I'll have to ask Papa Pea (aka Mr. Science) for an explanation of that.

Question:  Why-oh-why didn't I start my inside seeds earlier this year?

Answer:  Well, dum-dum, if you had they would be leggy, pale and totally lacking in vigor by the time the weather was warm enough to set them out.

Question:  Will I ever be able to have a long enough growing season for my garden to mature?

Answer:  Yep.  There have been very few years when you haven't managed to get a good crop of most everything planted.  Except for those full-sized tomatoes.  And eggplant.  And corn.  And . . . )

Question:  Why can't I be out in my garden right now prepping the soil and planting my cool weather crops like others are?

Answer:  Because you're still getting freezing temperatures at night and you'd have to dig through the snow to plant those seeds that would not be happy and would lose their will to actually live and grow.

Bottom line:  Patience is a virtue which I must find and hang on to this time of year.

In the meantime, I do have some seeds started under lights.  Just look at these robust, little (understatement) guys who will be ready to go out into the garden and sunshine in a mere 8 weeks.  Or possibly 10.  Or so.