It’s time to garden. I need to garden. My mental health requires it.
Our winter was long, and our spring has been wet. As of April 8, I hadn’t even been able to do the mundane tasks of removing oak leaves from underneath the shrubs and replacing broken bricks in walkways and patios.
And this is Patriots Day weekend, when we traditionally plant peas, carrots, beets, radishes, onions, lettuce and other cool-season crops. Last year, the soil was ready in mid-March; this year, some gardens are either still frozen or too soggy.
In part, I want to garden so I can encourage plants to grow, thus producing food and flowers. But partly I need to get outdoors and do something productive. The indoor chores are up to date, and I need more fresh air.
There are signs of hope. The crocuses have blossomed and we’ve already got one early blue iris in bloom. The garlic shoots have poked through the ground-up leaves I put on them for mulch. Daffodils have come up as well, showing their fat buds along with their foliage.
It is not as though I have anything exciting planned for this year. We have ordered several “Pink Lemonade” blueberry bushes, just for the fun of it — to compare the bushes from several online nurseries. We are trying a new blight-resistant tomato from Johnny’s — it’s growing under lights in our cellar at this point.
We plan to plant some sunflowers this year instead of depending on birds to drop seeds, and we’re going to grow more “Bright Lights” Swiss chard, including some in a container on our patio.
As it happens in most gardens, we have some shrubs and trees to replace. And we’ve ordered a second rain barrel from the Portland Water District to go with the one we installed three years ago. None of this is earth-shaking, but gardening in Maine this growing season is getting off to a slow start.
Last fall, I put chopped-up oak leaves on the vegetable garden — not just the garlic — to add organic matter on the advice of Mark Hutchinson, an extension educator working out of Waldoboro. I’ll turn that soil with my U-bar (sometimes called a broad fork), and that should improve our soil and vegetable production.
After the winter we have had, after the start the Red Sox have had, and after the overall year the world has had, a stretch of quiet and comfort in the garden is just what I need.
Gardening, I have decided, is partially about mental health. Every year, gardeners know their lilacs are going to bloom in mid-May, about the same time you can start cutting some asparagus. The forsythia blooms will have dropped off by then, and our tulips will come out a bit later. Strawberries will start in mid-June — and this year, they should still be available for the Fourth of July — and raspberries will come in late July.
This all takes work on the part of a gardener, but nature works along with us and teaches us that life goes along more easily if you work with nature rather then against it. I will spend a lot of time just watching these flowers, fruits and vegetables come and then go.
My gardening will be that way too. I want food and flowers, but I am not going to stress out about it. There will be failures, and that is OK — I’m an amateur gardener, not a professional farmer. I can go to the farm stands near our house or the farmers market near my office to buy the fruits, flowers and vegetables that don’t produce well in our garden. Our survival does not depend on what our garden produces.
But the surprises won’t just be failures. Maybe a peony we planted a while ago will blossom for the first time. Maybe the new magnolia will do especially well (it has some nice fat buds right now). We did a lot of garden renovations last fall, and how those gardens work is sure to be a surprise. And those pleasant surprises are part of gardening as well.
We will be planting, tending, watering and harvesting.
But the my main goal for this gardening season is to relax and enjoy it.
Tom Atwell can be contacted at 791-6362 or at
tatwell@pressherald.com
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