Planting Days

25Apr14

Yesterday was another first of spring -- first dusty, dirty dragging in tired after planting day.  First day of thighs feeling tight and weak after towing a garden cart laden with a heavy roll of plastic mulch up Hawk’s Hill.  The first day you’ve pushed yourself to do everything you possibly can in a day.  We ate sweet & sour cabbage, noodles and tofu for dinner, our jeans dirty & dusty, our cheeks ruddy, our eyes bearing the soft darkness of fatigue, yet glowing with the joy of the work accomplished.  We celebrated the return home from college of our beloved Sarah, the joy of reunion and the delight of sharing stories of conquests from Sarah’s writing award and exams completed, to David’s reawakening of an ancient computer, its retro games reinvigorating memories of our children’s childhoods.

On my knees in the garden this morning, poking holes in black plastic, and setting onion starts into the soil, I let the song of the Mockingbird wash over me, the cheeky warble of the Rufous-Sided Towhee echoing from the fencerow treetops enliven me.  Grounded, racing the coming rain, I poked the plastic with a tool my friend Steven made for me from a stick (works great).  A poke into the plastic breaks open a hole in the mulch and down into the soft earth just right for a little transplant to fit into.

Sweet Candy, Walla Walla and magenta Red Zeppelin onion starts tucked into the good earth, spreading down the rows like a tide of new life, standing tall as dancers in a line.  The hissing of soaker hoses beneath the plastic rang like the song of celebration.  Knowing the onions’ torpid roots were just now reawakening, just now reaching out to the life-giving water, just now stretching towards fruitfulness, I pictured them in months to come, rounded and fat, with their tall flags of greens standing up, or bundled in threes for the market table.

Sowing -- whether plants or seeds -- has a magical quality, the beginning of new life after the stillness of winter.  The work is intense, knotting muscles in shoulders and back, but delighting my soul and body and mind.  Pausing as  I plant, I look to the treeline, to witness 3 male Blue Jays courting a female, to spy the bursting changes in the tree canopy if not hour to hour, at least within the span of the day, to witness every shade of spring, the subtle changing-of-the-guard from early spring woodcocks’ crazy crepuscular whistling flight to Cardinals and Robins and Mockingbirds, to the new activity of the Blue Jays.  Nature’s ceaseless show requires only observation for admittance.

My basket of onion starts emptied as the first drops of rain spattered the plastic.  I stood, dusted my hands off on my jeans and, pressing palms together in my prayer of Namaste, I bowed to my new starts, thanking God for the privilege of planting, for the gift of the soil and the balm of nature, and asking blessings on the growing plants.  Rain drops plonking on my head, I tucked away my stick tool in the garden shed, and toted my basket up to the house for lunch and more conversation with my beloveds.

Rain pattered away all afternoon, and after I cleaned the chicken coop, filling it with fresh, dry oak leaves, topping off the feeder, and tucking a fresh egg in my flannel shirt pocket, I found myself with an hour to kill before dinner preparation.  

Spring invites new beginnings.  The press of planting season is on in the sunshine, but the wise farmer knows to never walk on wet soil, or the result will be compacted concrete-like earth.  Planting in the rain is out of the question.  

I meandered over to a collection of massive flat stones in the pasture that David had mentioned at lunchtime.  The spring grass and raspberry canes were beginning to climb over the 2’ x 3’ x 1’ chunks of rock, and we knew if we didn’t haul them out soon, they would be camouflaged by rampant weed growth until November’s frosts revealed the earth’s bones again.  Rain sprinkled and pattered as my true love and I sized up our prizes.  They would fit nicely around my new water garden, Stonehenge-like shoulders to bound the trickling pool.  We dispatched ourselves -- David to start the tractor, and me to clear space around the water garden where the stones would set.

The rain began to patter down harder as I set the “Monster Strap” around the first slab of rock, and David eased the tractor forward.  The wet grass slipped right under the stone hunk, and the tractor pulled the monolith along with the ease of a child’s string toy.  The cold droplets of rain tingled on our skin and plastered our hair down to our heads.  

David towed each of the rocks into place, and found one more down in the brush near our granddaddy Sugar Maple.  Clambering in among rosebushes and sapling ashes, I hooked the strap to the wet rock and David pulled it free with the old Kubota.  Then, with the blade on the tractor, David pushed the stones into place, and I dropped some perennials I had dug from around our old trailer into the spaces between the thick rocks.  Now the water garden began to take shape.  We stood back sopping wet to admire our creation as cold spring rain dripped down from a stone-colored sky.

The tractor parked and silent, the only sound that remained was that of rain drops and the burbling water garden. As we walked back to the house from the barn, headed to a hot shower, I got the first thrill of walking up on the pool of musical water hidden behind massive stones. The sound reached my ears before my eye caught a glimpse of the secret that lies beyond the rocks and plants.  Somehow, the knowledge that a secret, sunken garden awaits visitors to Soulstice’s front porch just tickles my fancy.

May your fancy be tickled!
Betsy