Spring Dirt Work

Most gardeners get their enthusiasm up as soon as the spring garden catalogs arrive in their mailboxes (thjat would be about February 1, long before they are going to be planting anything). They look at all the exotic plants and the beautifully colored pictures and imagine what it’s going to look like in their own garden this summer. Or not, because the home plantings never seem to work out quite as well as the ones in the catalog do. My own take on this is that catalogs, like plant nurseries, sell dreams not plants. Mostly I rely on things that I see in my neighbors’ gardens. If they can get it to grow, I can get it to grow.

What really sends me into spring gardening fever are those first cool days of spring when the ground is at last not too wet to put a trowel into. You get out there and clean things up and then you turn a little soil, or a lot of soil…all in anticipation of the actual planting. I’m a fanatic about keeping my hands clean (some Lady Macbeth business in my past?), so gardening is almost always done with good gloves. I consider gardening gloves as one of my most cherished tools and my current pair came from my sister as a birthday present and are indeed winners. They even have little drying pads around the wrists that are attached with velcro to keep my hands (and especially my wrists) from experiencing a sweaty feeling. So unpleasant. Eventually, I’ll wear through the finger tips, but until then, I’m enjoying them, and when they’re gone maybe I’ll ask her to buy me another pair from wherever in Southern California she finds such things.

Today’s digging in the dirt was mostly routine stuff, but it surely felt good to be out on one’s hands and knees with one’s hands properly protected and my own gardening dreams beginning to open out. Just to show, however, how good women have it: While I am doing this, Ed is in an 18-inch crawlspace (he’s as thin as he ever was, fortunately) digging with a tablespoon or something in the dirt underneath the house he is renovating. Point Roberts tends to feature houses that are built on top of the ground, but not too far on top of the ground. Not so far that you would have much of a crawl space. He is working out new water lines for the new plumbing which has to join up with the old plumbing and there’s no place for that to happen without digging a trench under the house. So, while I am digging in my garden, he is digging underneath the house, an activity that i will never have to even contemplate, let alone actually do.

However, we are like the seven dwarfs: we dig, dig, dig, the whole day through. But what he is doing seems to me more like a WWII movie where plucky American prisoners dig themselves out of the Nazi prison camp, hiding the dirt in their pockets or small containers. Perhaps I’ll go take him a teacup. As soon as I finish looking at this gardening catalog.