GARDENER’S JOURNAL

The payoff of gardening is this; you are not only watching cellular life at work in spades, you are using different types of spades for your garden work to push that dirt around. And speaking of dirt, that thing they say about gardening people all being a little crazy, simply not true. Most of us are much too old to be crazy however we have lived long enough to cultivate a little more carefree attitude. But speaking about care, we are caring people and when the children have all flown away you have more time. And in regards to things that fly, you have now developed this wonderment about birds that you didn’t have time to think about when you were busy running businesses and having kids etc. Suddenly you want to know who is making that sound in the morning. Is it the warbler, the Carolina wren, the Baltimore oriole, the mourning dove, the chickadee?

You have moved yourself out of the density of the city and into a quieter place where you can hear all the sweet bird songs and red wing black birds arguing in the trees. Spring is usually when they are heard most often and speaking of spring, there is an extra spring in your step, that feeling of urgency that enters the blood stream and because you are a bit old-er now, you need an extra push to get you out of your morning pages or that new course you started up in winter. The course of a seedling to maturity is in itself a small but substantial miracle. I have taken to buying seeds in mid winter at seedy Saturday events where gardeners donate their collected seeds. These events have popped up everywhere in Southern Ontario and speaking about things popping up, that is pretty much what seeds do in my little basement grow-op which I manage daily from mid March to early April. I time the seeding to coincide with the exact moment when they are ready to be taken outside and hardened off. And speaking of hard, that is the one time when activity is very hard on the old back.