Too Many Chickens

I LOVE SPRING!!! Ok, I don’t love every aspect of it…like the tornados and floods and spiders and mosquitoes…but I always feel so alive and full of hope and promise when the world starts turning green. As much as I complained about working on the farm when I was growing up you’d think I’d be glad that I live in town now (if you can really call the spot in the road where I live a town…lol), but there is always this compelling urge…a deep undeniable yearning for creative cultivation. Starting in early February I begin collecting this stack of catalogues from the mail…full of pictures of flowers and trees and vegetables and growing supplies…some even come with planting diagrams…which I always find fault with and can spend hours improving…on graft paper that I keep handy because I never know when I’ll wake up in the middle of the night with a blueprint I’ve dreamed up and need to sketch before I fall back to sleep (my chickens never roost!…lol). Anyway…I devour these publications…slowly savoring the selection of shrubs…perusing perfect perennials…envisioning a voluminous variety of tasty tomatoes and succulent squash. I leaf through them again and again…comparing prices, colors, heirlooms and hybrids. My yard is, for the most part, a sad combination of ash and clay…I can’t seem to use enough Miracle Grow to coax the tiny sprouts into adulthood. One year I went as far as to buy a truck load of landscape timbers and bags of topsoil to build a small raised garden out back. I’ve never had such a fine crop of dandelions as I did that year…lol. Last year I decided that my grandson was old enough to appreciate this miracle of nature and wanted to share the whole experience with him. He has helped me in the yard since he was big enough to walk…pulling weeds (and the occasional flower…lol)…raking up the leaves so we can play in them…and packing sticks after a storm (which we have had more than our share of lately). He loves watching the flowers turn into berries in his little strawberry patch, and can’t wait for the tiny green tomatoes to show up so he can pick them off and throw them…lol. I got a couple of the cheap plastic starter boxes…the ones with the peat pellets in them, some tomato, zucchini, and yellow squash seeds, and mentally prepared for science class. It wasn’t long before he got bored with the planting process…I mean after you stick a couple of seeds in the peat it gets kinda repetitive, and 3 yr olds aren’t known for their long attention spans (especially in this family!!!). Every time he came over he would run to check on our project. I know the days it took for those seeds to sprouts were years in his world. When anyone came to the house he would proudly show off our garden to be and tell them all about how we stuck the seeds in the dirt stuff and he had to make sure they always had water and that we were gonna put them outside when they got bigger. When the day for transplanting finally arrived we gathered our tools and sprouts and got to work. After the ground was ready and the seedlings were gently placed in their holes, I left him to stand guard while I went back in to get more water. When I got back he proudly showed me that he had helped while I was gone….he showed me how he had stepped on each tender delicate plant so that he could push it in the ground better for me. The glowing smile on his face kept the dismay I felt from showing…I thanked him for trying to help and explained that next time maybe we shouldn’t push them in so hard, and with a resigned sigh…made plans to buy seedling and replace them the next day…lol. I can hardly wait until my granddaughter is older so I can share my love of nature with her as well. I’m really missing my daughter right now because (even though she fought it for years…lol) she shares this need to work the warm earth…to touch the renewed life of spring. And it isn’t truly spring until we squish mud between our toes…lol.

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