Spring Start (and Stop?)

On an absolutely spring-like day last week, we decided to go for it. Or rather, I decided to go for it. You see, every late winter we play a little game here in Texas called Is It Spring Yet?

This game has been one we have won a couple of years and lost a couple of years, not counting the first three years we weren’t prepared to even participate. Most of this game involves watching the weather forecast starting in Mid-February. Then the bags of compost and soil amendments are taken out and I tell myself we are simply getting the beds ready for spring.

And then, on a week that is particularly spring-like, when birds are chirping and the wood stove isn’t so necessary in the morning and the laundry whips nostalgically in the warm breeze, I make what feels at the time to be a completely logical decision: Let’s Plant!

And then I spend the coming weeks completely taken in, checking the weather forecast multiple times per day. I frantically drag out blankets and sheets of plastic late in the evening and wonder, with an arm full of firewood, why it is that I feel the need to live life so close to the edge.

Some years this game goes thrillingly well. The beets germinate, the lettuce is harvested early, and I beat that great foe of every Minnesota girl everywhere – Texas summer. And some years I lose everything to a late frost.

And I tell myself that maybe next year I will learn. Maybe next year I will wait.

But that never lasts more than minutes and not long thereafter I am at it again, hoeing rows and making plans and dragging out the aforementioned blankets. Because – and this is probably just me – why wait to plant when you could plant now? Why put off something that could result in delicious greens, a lower grocery bill, and dirt under my fingernails… even if it could also go terribly, terribly wrong?

I suppose that might be me in a nutshell.

And so it is that I walked our new beds yesterday with tiny sprouts just peeking through, knowing that we are expecting a bit of a freeze tomorrow night. And the night after and the night after… and who knows beyond that. So the blankets are coming out and I am considering ordering more seeds because, well, I guess you win some and you lose some, as they say, and it’s looking like I might need to concede this round.

But we’ll see how these new sprouts hold up before I assume the worst and look into more seeds, because I am nothing if not perhaps overly – some might say foolishly – optimistic.

Ahem.