Planting Hope

The day before the second snowstorm of the fall we planted bulbs: two dozen daffodils and about 50 crocuses, placed here and there through the perennial bed. This is the garden we completely overhauled in the spring, when COVID reshuffled our regular weekend routine of soccer-soccer-soccer, and we found time on Saturdays and Sundays freed up for other things. Months later, with the pandemic raging more strongly than in those first confused and uncertain days – and with the presidential election finally upon us – my children and I tucked papery-brown bulbs into the cold dirt.

I often think that gardening – whether it’s planting vegetable seeds in the spring or flower bulbs in the fall – feels like hope. That couldn’t be any truer than during this year.

I am no big fan of November – the dark days and barren landscape of that in-between-sun-and-snow month. And while I love winter, this year my anticipation of it is more apprehensive than eager. I wonder how we will manage if the kids return to remote schooling (indeed, we already know my older two will spend most of December and the first half of January learning remotely), and whether we will be able to celebrate holiday traditions – and winter birthdays – with family and friends.

The continuing unknowns of 2020 can seem overwhelming sometimes. 

In March, when my work and the kids’ school switched from in-person to remote, literally overnight, we gradually settled into a routine of daily walks, study time, late afternoon family soccer games. Then, the days were lengthening toward summer. The green shoots of flower bulbs planted in autumns long past were poking through the warming earth, and I was contemplating what seeds to sow in the vegetable bed.

Now, of course, we’re heading toward the long nights of winter rather than the promise of spring.

We planted bulbs this fall because in our re-do of the perennial garden, we discarded many things – an abundance of weeds, along with perennial roots and, yes, years-old daffodil and crocus bulbs. And because I have a feeling this winter will seem long. That there will be joy, but also frustrations, more milestones missed, and normal activities canceled or rearranged.

Folding those bulbs into the soil on the cold and blustery first day of November was an act of planning for spring blooms, yes, but it was also a gesture of hope. 

Original content published by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul. This essay appears as Meghan's November 12, 2020 Close to Home column in the Littleton Record.     

Turning the soil

For days now, I’ve been scanning the ground when I’m outside, watching the slowly growing shoots of green for signs of that first spring bloom. This is a ritual I’ve kept since childhood, when I would jump off the school bus each spring afternoon and scamper down the driveway to my mother’s flower garden, peering into the neat tangle of perennials just starting to brighten from winter brown to green. There was a small cluster of crocuses planted there, in Easter shades of purple and yellow and white. When the first one finally burst through and opened its dainty cup to the strengthening sun, I knew spring had arrived.

Some people, with drier, warmer garden beds than mine, have already spotted their first blooms this spring. Alas, while the snow has melted from our perennial garden, I think the one crocus we had has drowned. It seems I’ll be waiting awhile still for the first sunny burst of yellow daffodils, which will fade away to deep purple flag irises, feathery pink astilbe, and buttery gold Stella D’Oro daylilies.

While I wait for the flowers, I have turned my attention to the vegetable gardens, tending to the compost heap, which was neglected all winter, and tilling last fall’s layer of leaves into the dark, wet dirt. The big garden out back of the house is still too soggy to work much. But the two smaller beds in the side yard are well-drained and ready for planting. Into one of these this week we sowed our first crop of peas, dropping the small, dried spheres into the warming soil.

My children happily paused from their sandbox play to help set the wire fencing that will serve as pea trellis, then place a handful of seeds into neat rows. We all love the feeling of digging fingers into yielding earth, and we can nearly taste the sweet peas that will grow on the vines that sprout from those seeds, climbing slowly upward, then swelling with pods that we’ll break open for the sun-warmed treasure inside.

We’ve planted cherry tomato plants and cucumbers into pots inside, leaving them in the sunny shelter of the big window to soak in the warmth. The children check on these pots each day to see how the seedlings within have progressed. But this is not the same as digging in garden dirt, tilling the soil by hand, etching straight rows to take the seeds, carefully patting the earth above them.

So we have planted the first seeds of hope for a garden this year. And as the snow has receded, we have rediscovered some of our warmer weather activities – bike rides down the lane and walks through the woods road to the brook, where the children toss sticks for the dogs to chase. In our early spring ramblings, we have encountered all sorts of lichen and fungi, puff balls that smoke spores when touched, squirrel middens under tall hemlock trees, and a place on the big boulder out back where some animal scraped away thick moss in search, we think, of a meal.

Still, we are waiting for that first bloom. It might come with the daffodils, which creep higher each sunny day. But sometimes we find the first spring flowers in the wild – bloodroot peeking from beneath the crooked old apple tree by the clothesline, or marsh marigolds growing in bright patches along the brook, or trilliums and trout lilies pushing through leaf litter along the roadside. While we wait, we’ll keep turning the soil, preparing for the long, hot, growing days of summer.

And in the fall, after the vegetables have been harvested and the perennials cut back for winter, after I’ve turned the soil for the last time this year, I’ll try to remember to plant some crocus bulbs in the patch of garden by the living room’s big window, where the sun hits early and stays all day. That way, next year, we won’t have to look so hard or wait so long for the first bloom of spring.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears in the April 25, 2014 edition of the Record-Littleton.

Signs of Spring

I ordered my first batch of seeds for the vegetable garden this week, reminding myself that even as March snowfall blankets the ground in a clean layer of white, spring is – eventually – coming. March is notoriously fickle around here, changing from cold and snowy to warm and sunshiny, then back again. All of spring, really, is like that; last year a Memorial Day snowstorm had my flip-flop-wearing kids scrambling to find warm coats and mittens as they ran outside to build a snowman.

This year's buds, last year's leaves, and new snow.

Last week, as the season’s persistent subzero temperatures met us each morning, even my winter-loving children had had enough. “I just want it to be spring,” moaned my daughter, as her siblings agreed. When I reminded my skiing-sledding-shoveling-snow-angel-making kids that they loved winter, my son replied, “But, Mama, I like winter better when it snows.”

Lucky kid got his wish, waking up to a thin layer of snow Tuesday morning, followed by a major storm midweek. He rushed through breakfast and headed outside to shovel before going to school. As I approach the deadline for submitting this column, it’s snowing hard, with a foot or more predicted. That translates to three happy little skiers and a happy ski mom.

Of course, by mid-March, many folks are winter weary and ready for spring. Often, these are the same folks who don’t like winter in any month, and I find their choice of living in New England odd. But I admit there are days, as March stretches toward April, when I, too, long for warmer days and fewer layers of clothing.

This yearning happens to me at the waning of each season. Near the end of summer, I crave the crisp coolness and color of fall. As that color fades to stark brown and grey, I wish for the sparkle of winter’s snow and ice to brighten the landscape – and my psyche. After months of cold and winter white, I happily anticipate the return of color to the landscape.

The animals are ready for spring after a long winter of cold, too. In our field, the deer have returned lately to the old apple orchard, traversing our ski- and snowshoe-packed tracks and scratching through the crust to reach the cold, hard apples that fell last fall. More birds are arriving at the feeder, which during the coldest months is frequented mainly by chickadees and a pair of blue jays. I’m hesitant to refill the feeder now, as I’m sure the bears, too, will emerge from their winter hideouts soon.

Spring here can be a season of strange juxtaposition. Snowbanks piled high from a March storm stand adjacent to mushy mud puddles in the driveway. Leaf buds swell on the tips of tree branches even as icicles drip from the eaves of the house. Snow boots and winter hats mingle with mud boots and ball caps in the front hall. My children these days are likely to ski in the morning, then come home and haul their bicycles out of the garage in the afternoon.

I like to think of these seasonal contrasts as holding the potential for the best of both worlds. Ski in the morning, bike in the afternoon. Roll up sleeves and uncover faces to soak in the first warm sunlight of the year, then tuck into a favorite chair by the fire as the warmth of afternoon fades to the chill of evening. Watch the snow fall, then melt, then fall some more, as we plant the first seeds of spring into pots by the window.

No matter what the weather is outside, these little seeds will sprout and grow, reminding us that spring is – eventually – coming. In the meantime, we’re heading out to play in the snow.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul,posted to her Blog: Writings From a Full Life. This essay also appears as Meghan's Close to Home column in the March 14, 2014 edition of the Littleton Record.

Growing rocks

The past week or so has felt more like mid-summer than spring, and so over the weekend I made a good start at putting the vegetable garden in. The peas are planted and four rows of carrots, some greens, broccoli, and a few green beans. There’s still work to be done, of course. Always is with gardening.

Not quite potatoes...

No matter if I’m tilling the soil, planting seeds, or dragging weeds out by their roots, I often get a little ditty stuck in my head while in the garden. It’s something my kids learned at preschool from local musician and environmental educator Barb Desroches, and the refrain goes like this, “Rocks, rocks, rocks. There are rocks all over the earth. There are rocks on the mountain and rocks in the sea, so many rocks to see.” Barb doesn’t mention the rocks in the garden anywhere in her song, but they’re there, nonetheless.

It doesn’t matter how many rocks – from thumb-sized to boulder – I’ve dug and picked and sifted out of the garden the year before, every spring I find a new crop. And that crop seems to grow uninhibitedly through the spring and summer and into the fall. A few years ago while digging for Yukon Golds, I found some Granite State Boulders instead. It took half the afternoon to dig those suckers out, and they were too heavy to pick up, so I rolled them out the garden gate and left them for the tractor.

It’s no wonder, with all these rocks, that New England is crisscrossed by stone walls. The first farmers needed a place to pile all that glacial till – and, I suppose, a way to keep the animals in the pasture. It seems a little crazy that early settlers continued their attempts to farm this rocky soil. It’s tough enough to grow a family garden!

Of course, the early folks didn’t have the luxury of a quick drive to the store, regardless of the season, to pick up veggies grown in California or some other faraway place for dinner. What they grew was what they ate. And eating what you’ve grown by your own toil is still satisfying, even if the grocery store is just down the road. There’s just something pleasing, beyond that sun-warmed, fresh taste and superior nutrition, about growing and eating your own vegetables.

I picked more rocks than I care to count from the dirt today, as I placed in the garden the seeds that will grow into this year’s harvest. My feet and fingernails are dirty, my shoulders tinged brown from sun and soil, and it’s a joy to look at my little garden in the back yard and see the neat rows of dirt packed over the tiny seeds.

Sure, there is more rock picking to come this season, and too many weeds to pull and bugs to battle. But each morning, my first gaze will be out the bedroom window at that fenced-in rectangle, where I’ll watch the seeds sprout green from the dark soil, growing higher and fuller, flowering, bearing good food to eat. Unearthing a steady stream of rocks seems a small price to pay for that reward.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul, posted on her Blog: Writings from a full life.

Helicopters

Sunday, as I was walking to the garden to plant the seeds which I hope will bear an abundance of vegetables in the weeks and months to come, I was ambushed by a slew of miniature helicopters. The tiny whirligigs came spinning on a gust of wind from a great sugar maple, which only a couple of months ago was surrounded by a sea of snow, with two sap buckets hanging from its wide trunk. On Sunday, the small disks – the tree’s winged seeds – cut merrily through a summerlike mid-day. I’d never seen such a fleet.

My brothers and I used to take great delight in collecting the seeds – called samara – that fell from the large maple tree, whose thick limbs were perfect for climbing, next to our back deck. We’d toss handfuls of helicopters into the air, or drop them over the railing one at a time, wonderingly watching their twirling descent to the ground. The bombardment of seeds the other day reminded me of those childhood helicopter launches.

Sometimes I feel as if adulthood – dare I admit middle age? – has snuck up on me. Wasn’t I just a kid last week, flitting through the fabulous, carefree days of summer with skinned knees and new freckles? How is it that I have three kids of my own, that my parents are grandparents, that those lazy summer days are now filled with so much busy activity?

Likewise, the full bloom of late spring somehow surprises me each year. The snow seems to take forever to recede after ski season, the green emerges painstakingly slowly – a wisp of grass here, a budding tree there, the miniscule leaf of a lupine poking out from the brown field. And then, all of a sudden, my children are handing me great golden bouquets of dandelions, the lilacs are in full bloom, and the forests bordering the fields have formed a broad canopy of foliage.

And so it was this year, one day hauling buckets of sap from the old sugar maple for our small sugaring operation, the next marveling at the tree’s fruit spinning through the bright air, seeking a place for the next generation to take root and thrive.

The Magic of Seeds

The magic happens each spring. The cold, grey days of winter gradually warm to green. The robins and sparrows and slate juncos return to peck at the ground, their boisterous songs drowning out the happy warbling of the winter chickadees. The peepers sing their chorus from ponds and pools of snowmelt. And we plant seeds.

Our house has a large, south-facing window, reaching nearly a third of the way across the long living room, and that is where we start our summer garden. Into little pots of musty soil go the tiny, round seeds of broccoli and the larger seeds of zucchini, butternut squash, cucumbers. Most of the others we plant directly in the ground. But it’s too hard to wait until the end of May to sow the dream of fresh vegetables picked sun-warmed from the backyard garden.

Fairytales like Jack and the Beanstalk tell of magic seeds that reap adventure and riches. I don’t expect any of our seedlings to grow to the clouds. Still, there is something enchanting about planting seeds in the spring. There is magic in the promise of the summer bounty that will grow from these tiny seeds, planted when the garden has not yet thrown off the grip of winter. With a bit of dirt and water, sunlight and care, patience and hope, the magic emerges.

It has snowed since my young children helped me start the broccoli, their little fingers struggling with the miniscule seeds. Some mornings there is still a heavy frost, and today there is a crisp, white coating of snow on the mountaintops. But the broccoli plants are up a few inches. The squash we planted last week is beginning to pop through the soil, the succulent leaves emerging tiny before they spread and grow, reaching for the sun, reaching for summer.