Saturday

Well that wasn't supposed to happen! When you plant in spring, your create a checklist of important events: the planting of your lilies. The planting of perennials. The planting of annuals. The planting of seeds. The planting of fruit trees. The planting of other trees. The transplanting of seedlings. Dividing and planting old stuff. Transplanting. All that is on our list this year. (Not necessarily in that order -- you have to work with the weather to determine what happens when.) We'd gotten a late start because of the cold, but we moved quickly and we're catching up. 

One of our bigger projects was establishing that lavender field out back. I searched for good nurseries that sold small plants at good prices and I was pleased to find one with a large selection of English Lavenders. Those are going to be the most adaptable to southern Wisconsin's particular climate. They came on time, I opened the box and let them breathe and earlier this week, Ed and I put them in the ground.

But they looked wonky. I spotted mildew. The roots weren't white and fresh, they were yellow or brown  and dry. Still, this is a solid nursery. Lavender can be slow to perk up. I decided to put them in.

Not only did they not perk up -- they shriveled and died. Most of them are worthless clumps of nothing. 

I called the nursery and they are good people who stand behind their plants. As I was waiting on hold for a pick up, I kept hearing their message: when your plants arrive, wiggle them out of their pots. If the roots look yellow and brittle, your plant may have died in transport.

In my four decades of perennial growing, I have never received a failed batch of plants. Oh, there is the occasional one that needs extra TLC, but it will bounce back once in the ground. I'm stunned that this can happen to some 45-50 plants.

All this means we have to replant the whole bed. But but but.. it's going to be so hot next week and I'll be gone the week after (Chicago)! Have we missed our golden lavender planting window?

A grower is a person who is by nature an optimist (I'm not the first to observe this). I believe in our projects! But this one is off to a rough start. And, of course, we are now once again behind!

On the upside, it is a gorgeous day! Stunning and sunny and just warm enough to feel happy (though the kids complained that the car was too hot and that by the way, their favorite seasons were autumn and winter).

Looking around, you cannot believe that the flowers are far along. Everything is exploding. The tulips, finally!

Our rhubarb is out of control as usual. I haven't made much of a dent in the frozen stalks I'd cut up last summer so I decide to bake a rhubarb cake for breakfast and snacks (the kids love it, I love it, Ed loves it).

This is the morning the older two come over.

(Recently, chasing Ed with a ball is a popular activity around here.)

And after I take the duo home...

(The welcome appearance of dandelions!)

... Ed and I head out to Natalie's Nursery to give her our hundreds of small planting pots and to pick up a couple of flowers to replace the ones devoured by the cheepers, as well as some starter veggies and melons. Ed grew ambitious overnight and decided to go for a bigger produce bed out back. We'll see if these will survive the groundhog and deer attack.

No time to dally in the afternoon. I get to work. And it's a joyous, long stretch of work. Apart from the sad lavender patch, everything else is looking pretty special!

Kids, you're so wrong. All season have their stellar moments, but spring has an unbeatable edge to it: this is when plant life shines!

Friday

If you are a musician, a composer and a player of an instrument for example, what part of your work is more enjoyable -- the composition or the performance? Do you toil with a sheet of music and perk up when you play it for an audience? It seems to me I've read too many stories of the rough life of a musician going on tour. You remember the lyrics to Simon and Garfunkel's Homeward Bound? (What? You dont know it? ... and each town looks the same to me, the movies and the factories, and every strangers face I see reminds me that I long to be homeward bound...) Unless you're Lady Gaga or some famous singer person, it seems that it's a miserable existence: endless "reasonably priced" (meaning uninspired) hotels and motels where you just don't care about the stains on the carpet or the minibar supplies anymore. You try hard not to hear the people laughing in the room next door. You sleep, you get up and you do it again and again, all year long. That's called being successful. No bookings means you're staying home and wondering why no one likes your music. That can't be fun. Or is it that the performance itself gives you such a thrill that it's all worth it? 

It seems book writers face a similar dilemma: do you go on book tours? I read Ann Patchett's memoir-ish book and it seemed her readings had her trotting to those "reasonably priced" hotels, as she toured bookstore after bookstore, sometimes to large audiences but also to small ones, reading, signing, smiling, reading, signing, smiling. Again, she is a total success story. Writing is her job and she is an absolutely stellar author person and still I thought to myself -- book tours and promotions sound absolutely awful to me. I wonder if, in all honesty, she even likes them?

For me, there is no question here: I like the writing part. If I ever do readings, deep down I'll be thinking -- I'm sure glad I'm not famous and that I can decide where to read and more importantly, if to read. Publicity is definitely not fun and I'm glad that at least there is someone who has been charged with doing a good bit of that work for me (in some small amount). 

My Great Writing Project is really coming to an end and isn't that just.... well, great!

In other news -- I'm paying the price for working so hard outside. I got my first tick. In the scalp. I'm not surprised. The field in back of the barn is rarely visited by the cheepers and frequently visited by all sorts of wildlife. You're sitting on the ground just begging for some critter to jump on you! Ah well, it was an early catch. When I fired off a note to my friend in Michigan (who is both an outdoor sportswoman and a terrific gardener), she sent back a chuckling email: [my husband] has had 7 so far, me 1, two in the house-1 on the wall and 1 on the sofa. Okay fine. My one seems puny! Tis the season after all.

The weather is still a tiny bit cool, but we're getting to the days that are sunny and warm. They nearly always hit us in the middle of May. Ed and I will be planting our 100 tomatoes this Sunday. We do not expect cool nights anymore. It very much looks like an early tomato season after all.

Breakfast. With cranberry black walnut bread, from our Fitchburg Farmers Market (which started up this week!). A guy grows his own black walnuts and spends the winter shelling them. I mean, a labor of love.

Lots of Zoom calls and emails, mostly about the Great Writing Project. 

And finally, I get to pick up Snowdrop. 

 We pause by the pond by her school: so many swans! (Are they swans?? They are not: a subsequent check tells me they are American White Pelicans. I didn't think we were on a Pelican migration path, but apparently we just make it! Did you know these birds eat more than four pounds of fish per day? We watch them dive for it. And did you know that this bird has the second largest wingspan of any North American bird, after the California Condor? Amazing! Right across the road from Snowdrop's school.)

 

It's a treat to retreat into her world for the afternoon. It's warm enough for Snowdrop to want to stay outside. At the next door playground.

(this one is her hands down favorite!)

How nimble a young child is! I tell her that I used to be athletic when I was her age, but living smack in the middle of Manhattan gave me few outdoor choices. A skateboard along a sidewalk. That's it. And our school playground? A slab of concrete between two tall buildings.

(Back at the farmette...)

(Cherries? Cherries. From the US, though certainly not from the Midwest!)

(Trying to, but never succeeding in annoying Ed...)

And the boys back home? Well, Sparrow is explaining to me something about the nose...

...and Sandpiper looks questioningly at me to see if I perhaps came with something amounting to a slice of cake or perhaps peanut butter puffs. (I did not.)

Evening: you do not want to know what dinner looked like here, at the farmhouse. It was totally disgraceful in my book and absolutely perfect according to Ed. Salads, yes those. And then -- reheated slices of a reheated pizza from yesterday and the day before for Ed, and fried eggs tossed on top of the salad for me. I will return to real cooking. Honestly I will. Just possibly not this week, when the grandkids, the GWP and the garden are using up as much of my bandwidth as I appear to have in me these days.

But with so much love!

Thursday

Well now, wasn't this a busy, lovely day! Still, not so busy that I would need sticky notes plastered on the bathroom mirror to remind me what needs to be done. It all remains in my head. I'm training myself to be mentally nimble. (Or, you could say that nothing that I do is so important that it matters much if I forget it.)

Much of my time right now is spent on coordinating a friend visit -- one that actually isn't in the books until for early fall. Ridiculously far away! I have a whole blooming season before we get to those weeks. Nonetheless, it's a complicated visit because many people are involved and we all have ideas on how it should proceed. Coordination requires work. Now, I thought this would be a great day for it. Rain! Can't plant anything in a wet landscape.

But there was no rain. Indeed, it was a lovely, warmish day. 

 

There is a high cloud cover, which is wonderful for work in the garden. So every reason to go outside! Which we do. Eventually. Very eventually.

(Breakfast)

After our morning computer work.

 

We do succeed in finishing the planting of our lavender field. I'm not happy with the health of some of the baby plants, but maybe they'll perk up in a few days. I'm hoping.

And all this sucked up the last shreds of the early day. 

 

Pick up Snowdrop time came very quickly! How good it is to bring her here when the weather is so... pleasant!

Really, really pleasant.

She reads, does homework, exhales. And I exhale with her. Ed comments -- she;s getting to be such an older child already! 

He is correct.

And then I take her home where her hardworking dad and active little brother and tired older little brother await.

And once more I cannot think about cooking at home. I reheat take out pizza for us, Ed dozes. (To my credit, I do make large and bountiful salads when I get lazy with cooking.) And spring continues to move forward, unveiling its beauty each and every day. Makes you smile, doesn't it?

With love...

Wednesday

Here, in Wisconsin, it's the kind of day where you say to yourself -- isn't the world a most beautiful place? A rhetorical question. It is a beautiful place.

I'm told that the town we live in dipped down to 33F, so nearly freezing last night, but I didn't see it. At its coldest moment (6 a.m.) our thermometer registered 36F. In any case, our annuals grumbled and grimaced among themselves, but they survived.

And Sandpiper survived his crash number 326 as well. Blood's wiped up, and only a fat lip remains. But Wednesday is not a grandkids day for me this spring. Wednesday is work-my-butt-off-in-the-garden day, especially since we are finally starting the uphill climb in temperatures. And the sunshine! Yes, there is plenty of it. Ed even complained that he wasn't prepared!

Breakfast, still inside, but hopefully not for long!

Our project for today is to start in on the lavender field. 

Ed had put down a tough black plastic last fall and though that strategy is never fully effective (we have some killer weeds out back!), it does cut down on the thick-rooted devils. Today, I take out my baby plants and arrange them on the chip-covered tarp and with Ed's help, I get to work.

I plant twenty, he plants ten -- that's most of them! 

The next two days will give us rain (again!) but after that we should have good working weather. We are on track to finish this job, just about the time the replacement trees for our "New Forest" arrive. Another two dozen saplings to plant out back. 

But that's not all: in the late afternoon, I finish adding some perennials in the established fields and I do some weeding as well -- this, of course, is now a staple activity for me: weeding is something that I will do daily until right around August 5th, when I will throw down my shovel and give up for the rest of the season.

Oh and I do this: Ed gets the tractor mower working and I take on the task of giving the whole property a selective trim. I do this about three or four times in the growing season, just to cut back some of the high grasses and to create paths throughout the property. Ed will likely take over maintaining the paths. It's a fairly easy job, since we are not obsessive mowers. Just enough to keep things healthy and navigable out there. 

My sweet helper tells me -- you really worked hard today! But the fact is, I dont feel it. The farmette lands are at their most thrilling point right now, when all your work planting perennials last year and for years before that, is starting to show promise. And you still think you know what you're doing. Your mistakes aren't evident -- it all looks wonderful!

So I work, but I also look and enjoy the progression that is before us. A perennial parade that starts now and doesn't end until September.

(Here's something I planted in the fall. It has a pretty name: Fritillary meleagris. I remember thinking -- wow, this plant is interesting! And it is. It's not a tulip but a lily. It's small and gets a little lost in the spring patch, right in front of the virginia bluebells (which are almost flowering!), so I thought I'd highlight it here, on Ocean. Hello, flower!)

Evening? After working almost nonstop from 10 onward, I am in no mood to cook. Pizza delivery! Windows open, the spring air mixing with farmhouse smells of roasted garlic and mushrooms on mine (and a gazillion veggies on Ed's because at Mods, the price is the same no matter how many toppings you order).

Yeah, it's a really beautiful place we inhabit. For sure.

Tuesday

Well, it's going to be close: 34F tonight. That's 1C. None of my flowers will like it. But they will survive, unless the forecasters are off by one degree in the wrong direction!

One more day of rain. Of wet branches that spray you with water if you brush against them. Of puddles in the driveway. Of the sound of drips, everywhere drips, gently feeding roots, but keeping us mortals wet too, so that we stay indoors. 

Turn on the oven, bake muffins. Eat breakfast.

I'm working on the Great Writing Project once again. We are down to making decisions about the cover and in this project I involve the young families. I know what I don't like but I don't know how to fix it. They, on the other hand, are full of ideas. And this leads me to wonder -- do younger people churn out ideas faster and in greater numbers? Are they better at stretching, at reaching past the obvious? I think so. And I admire them for it! So good to have them on my side as I get older, don't you think?

 

In the afternoon I pick up Snowdrop. She is this week the assistant parent (as her mommy is out of town for a few days) and she takes on that job with great seriousness and determination. And she's good at it! But here, in the farmhouse, she has the freedom today to just do what feels good for her. 

The famous farmette trilogy: she reads (with or without me), she eats, she plays. 

(Today, the play part involves Ed...)

 

In the evening I make an unexpected trip to the young family's place. Sandpiper, the child who, I predict, will be the first to break his arm or bang up his knees and require stitches doing active-kid things as he navigates childhood, had a bit of a bang-up, requiring an immediate trip to the doc, just as mommy was boarding a plane somewhere at some connecting airport and daddy was feeding the bunch a special daddy-prepared dinner. So I spent an evening calming the older two grandkids and reading endless stories about Piggie and Bad Kitty, with the goal of getting the kids focused on bedtime. They've heard them all, but it was a good evening for reading stories that they know almost by heart.

 

Night time. I check on the outside temperatures again and again. They're holding to predicted levels. Hang in there, flowers! This is the last moment of peril for you! Smooth sailing follows! I'm sure of it! Well, pretty sure.

Monday

In went the seeds today: nasturtium, alcea, alyssum. Sugar snap peas! And in went the last of the tub flowers. I had to do damage control. These monsters ate up all of the little white flowers on the full grown alyssum and they are working their way through the gaura leaves as well!

Honestly! There's not enough green stuff for you in the garden? You have to eat my flowers?

In the meantime, the lavender still waits. And it will wait some more through a wet tomorrow. And we wait too, for the fruit trees to start blooming, for the tulips to emerge, for the progression of May pinks and blues and yellows. We're gettin' there, but it's a slow crawl this year!

The rest of the day? I worked on some travel ideas for friends. It's not an unpleasant activity, but it took time. Lots of time. I did have a most wonderful break. Primrose called and I got to see her sweet roses -- a gift for her very first dance recital this past weekend. Oh, how fast they grow!

And there you have it -- a still cold May 2nd, a busy Ocean author and a very short Ocean post! 

Sunday

I never thought that the farmette land, where I plant gazillion perennials and another gazillion annuals, where I scatter seeds, sometimes very deliberately, sometimes almost randomly, where I break my back weeding and twist my knee planting, where I spend too many hours thinking what needs to be changed or redone next year -- I never thought this was a garden and that I was engaged in gardening. I am, in my mind, tending the land, filling spaces with something that is beautiful and beneficial, mostly because the land is there and without my efforts, it would become a jungle of weeds and saplings.

Yes, I will always love flowers, but I've long given up on thinking like, say, a gardener would think while planning a border in Giverny or in one of those exquisite British gardens. My flowers are in fields that at the periphery merge into unkempt grasses and creeping charlie. They are massive, true, but they aren't planned. I just fudge the edge and push it back with new or divided plantings, but there are always the raspberry canes and countless common blue violets that threaten to take charge if I let my guard down too much. 

I thought about all this today as I worked many, many hours, giving an all out effort to get the flower fields in order this year. If I learned anything from my countless visits to Giverny it's that the farmette isn't a garden waiting to be developed. One of my Ocean readers hinted at this a couple of years ago when she gently suggested that I not mind all that is wild here. She is correct: there will always be spaces that will have none of our intervention (the old orchard comes to mind). They are there to remind me that we cannot and should not control everything that grows here. And so I work in partnership with what is already growing, and sometimes I am more ambitious (last spring) and at other times I'm a little more realistic (this year), and in the end, I love it all. 

Weather report for this May Day? Well, a bit cool again and cloudy. So I keep my jacket on and get to work. After breakfast.

(The path to the farmhouse door is picking up color from the pots...)

The weather will still be messing with us for the next several days, with dips and lows that aren't a farmer's best friend at this late date, but at least I'm relatively confident that we'll stay above freezing at night. Last year, we had a beautiful and early spring, but we dipped into a frost all the way in mid May -- that's a horrible event that does more damage than this cooler, slower growing season.

In the evening, the young family is here for dinner. Snowdrop wants to pick some flowers for her teacher (this is actually an assignment: the school is celebrating teachers this week and on Monday, the kids are to bring a real or drawn flower). I steer her to the daffodils. Honestly, that's all that's pickable right now. 

The stems this year are solid. Last year, the early warm air pushed the flowers up before they were ready. This year, they took their sweet time to get strong and stand tall.

Inside: Sparrow is the most reliably committed French cheese eater. Just to take the edge off of total starvation!

(Happy to share with his brother...)

(Sandpiper opts for a bamboo spoon instead)

Dinner.

In the evening, I clear the kitchen and sit back with Ed on the couch, with that deep satisfaction of having had a very productive day.  May is off to such a good start for us! We are lucky. And grateful.

With love...

Saturday

You know, on this last day of April, with mostly cloudy skies and occasional rain, indeed, with storms and even a threat of severe storms, it really is very pretty out there! How can you not feel grand when the tree buds are so plump, when day after day, color saturates the landscape, when night frost is kicked out and the soil warms and the perennials push through and the daffodils? Definitely out in full force, scattered in nearly every farmette flower field.

It is a busy day here for me. I have a baked goods craving, and I consider whipping something up for breakfast munching, but time is a little precious, so instead, I drive over to the bakery and come back with an assortment of croissants and morning buns and chocolate babkas.

The kids come over then...

And we stay indoors because there is that threat of rain and besides, each child has a story to tell (Sparrow isn't always in a story mood, but quite often, I hear two parallel voices spinning tales out there in the playroom). And there's lunch to eat and there are books to read. We go for a common denominator -- not hard at all, as there are a number of books both kids enjoy.

(In leaving, she says -- "I'll race you!' This is a recipe for a total Sparrow upset. I tell him that in a few years, the upset may well be hers.)

In the afternoon, I chase the good weather. When it's not raining, I fix a couple of more pots and tubs and stick in the penstemon I had purchased for one of the beds.

(Ed takes out the trays of tomatoes and fusses with them outside.)

When the rain does come down, I unpack the lavender that arrived and is, for now, waiting in the mudroom. I am not 100% sure how to plant it (or rather how to protect the field from horrific weeds that grow behind the barn), which, I know, is a bit crazy, given that I have some 50 plants that are ready and waiting to go in, but I'm putting all this off until tomorrow. Today I'm still pulling weeds (everywhere!) and putting in annuals.

And when the rain continues to pelt the roof (such a lovely, rhythmic sound, don't you think?) I give in to the sleepiness of the moment and take that wonderful retired person's pleasure -- a late afternoon nap. 

Sure, we're really behind in our gardening. But everything is moving along nicely now and hey, we really are on the cusp of May already,  with its bounty of pinks and blues and yellows. Do you even remember how monochromatic my photos were from just a couple of weeks ago? Well now, not any more!

No, not any more.