Circle M Farm

Certainly I’m not the first over-zealous farmer to sneak into a garden at night with a flashlight to see if lovingly planted rows of seeds have yet sprouted. Am I? Well, my obsessive hovering has been rewarded this week with a flush of popping cotyledons squiggling out of the suddenly warmed soil. The worry and waiting of early spring’s damp, dark and chilly days have quietly evolved into an April that makes growing almost effortless.

The transformation occurs every year at some point, though every single year it appears as a miracle to brooding gardeners bent low over their pregnant dirt. Mother Nature simply refuses to bring it on at a particular date, apparently delighting in the anxious supplication of her mendicants. I guess she figures the requirement of faith makes the evidence of it’s reason all the sweeter. That is certainly the case with salad and spinach, both of which are up in brave little rows across the early garden.

These front-line soldiers were planted when the soil was still quite inhospitable, along with peas, whose tightly-curled seed leaves are finally unfurling from sturdy swan-neck stems. Their emergent lives could have been cut down by dry winds or pounding rains on any number of March days, yet here they grow. And so, too, scallions poke their fragile hair-like leaves through the earth, and kohlrabi and radish appear as tiny purple hearts next to tiny emerald hearts.

Now, more finicky seeds can go into the waiting dirt, those that object to the wild temperature fluctuations of the first thaw: beets, carrots, parsnips, onions, salad turnips. Meanwhile, the cold frames harbor flats of riotous brassicas more-than-ready to move into as-yet uncultivated beds in the gardens. “Where am I going to put all these cabbages? Will anyone eat all those brussels sprouts? What was I thinking?” I wonder, hit with the season’s first despair of abundance. This awkward emotion will cycle back many times throughout the growing year, as I manage the fruits of gardens planned when the days were dark, the beds were empty, the desire for fresh food was overwhelming, and optimism was boundless.

The downside of early spring’s profligate fertility is that everything needs doing all at once, both outside and in, where tomatoes, eggplants and peppers stretch flimsy first limbs toward fluorescent bulbs. Thirty meat chickens, ordered in that same week of reckless abandon when I seeded 100 cabbages, jump perilously close to the top edge of their feed-tub-brooder in my living room. Pins produce feathers and feathers will soon produce flight, so I must quickly produce an outdoor shelter and fenced-in pasture. In the sunny southern windows, chubby seed potatoes warm and sprout, scheduled for deployment in furrows the moment the first dandelion blooms in the lawn, while those relentless weeds push taunting buds toward the beckoning light. Of course, they are oblivious that the furrows aren’t dug yet. What was I thinking when I ordered 30 pounds of potatoes? I suppose I was thinking, “YUM!”