Editorial 3.2, February 2001, by Deirdre Helfferich Spring Madness Spring isn’t really here yet, despite the renewed presence of hungry hordes of redpolls, better than ten hours of sunlight, and the official date on the calendar. I know better. Spring is here only when I’ve got mud up to my armpits in the driveway. Anything prior to that point is wishful thinking. Or at least, that’s what I keep telling myself when I linger too long near all those beautiful seed packets at the supermarket. And that’s what I mumble half-heartedly to no one in particular as I page through the latest of the barrage of seed and garden catalogs that seem to be covering every square inch of horizontal surface in the house. I know I’m not alone in my desperation. But that thought provides small comfort in the face of such powerful temptation. I can tell it’s coming. Not spring, mind you. That isn’t due for another month or so (longer if you look at the snow and not the calendar). I’m talking about that annual insanity that precedes spring, the malady related to cabin fever: planting delirium. It usually hits me before this, but I think that producing the newspaper has provided me with a bit of resistance to the ravages of my husband’s most dreaded spousal lunacy. The time I would have been spending poring over gardening charts has been spent in front of a computer screen doing editing and layout. Most years I’ve succumbed by mid-February to the depths of gardening depravity: fondling seed packets, reading and rereading seed planting tables, making stacks of gardening books and tools on the kitchen table, drawing plans for planting trays and greenhouses and vegetable beds until the place looks like a cellulose snowstorm hit it. I can barely contain myself until the magic day when I actually get to plant something: February 28. Then out come the little packages of embryonic peppers, the eggplants, the parsley, the artichokes (I’m an optimist). Into the flats with the little rows of six-packs, 48 tiny little pots to a flat, a minimum of six for each variety, and normally about 30 to 40 varieties of the belladonna family alone (like I said, I’m an optimist). Soon I have enough herbs and vegetables planted to keep a commercial farmer happy, and I haven’t even started on the flowers. So then we live for the next two or three months with flats of this and pots of that, more added each weekend to the acres of dirt in the house, me madly transplanting every night and pouring gallons of water, love, and carbon dioxide over my tender little green children, until finally it is warm enough to move things outside. By then, of course, my long-suffering spouse is thinking of having me locked up for my own protection, and all the teeny tiny green shoots have turned into pale meters-long vines that I wouldn’t be surprised to find Tarzan swinging from. We haven’t seen the windows in weeks due to the verdant hedge between us and the glass, and have only dim memories of such things as window benches. By the time Moving Day comes, I’m too exhausted to haul everything into the greenhouse, so my spouse gets to help. But this year I seem to have been saved from all that. I only just started to get twinges of the Green Thumb Twitch on the 6th of February (this ailment usually strikes in January, with the unseasonal arrival of the first seed catalog). This was when my long-awaited aquatic plants arrived, and I got to do some planting right there in my living-room aquarium. Even the knowledge that my neighbors and friends have long since fallen victim to the annual scourge and are starting to drool over flower catalogs in public hasn’t affected me. I have not yet actually purchased seed starter mix. Maybe journalism is a preventative for runaway gardening frenzy. I haven’t gotten out my seed packets once. Yet. | ||
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