7 ~ Full circles

March is the month God created to show people who don’t drink what a hangover is like.    - Garrison Keillor

I used to feel much the same way as Keillor, but over the years March has gradually become one of my favorite months. Naturally, it brings some of the first signs of spring - such as bald eagles nesting and maple sap flowing. Yesterday, at the edge of the yard I saw my first woodchuck (a hibernator) of 2020, and male red-winged blackbirds have been braying from exposed perches for the last week or two. But for this dedicated winterphile, what I’ve grown to value about March is something else. 

March is a final pause, the last respite, before the biotic assault of spring and summer: mosquitoes, deer flies, deer ticks, gnats, ladybugs, Japanese beetles, poison ivy, stinging nettles, burdock, creeping charlie, quackgrass, a lawn to mow, jock itch, mildew, ants in the sugar, voles, moles, paper wasps and yellow jackets. There is also sunburn. Spring and summer have their benefits, but I often feel under siege from their explosion of life and light.  Constant alertness and defensive responses are required.  In winter, one need only dress warmly.  After winter’s gentle haiku, March is a last chance to catch my breath before the annual onslaught commences.  

March is also a welcome period of rest between the demands and calls of winter (weatherproofing the house, shoveling snow, skiing, snowshoeing, ice fishing, late season deer hunting), and all the summer work that lies ahead - gardening, foraging and preserving. It is a blessed interregnum I have come to cherish.  A time to slowly draw back my bow. 

 With the corona virus, this March 2020 finds most of us in an enforced period of rest.  For such an overworked, overextended, overstimulated culture (at least here in the United States), may this bring some unexpected benefits. If we will it so, it can.

This morning, I dug up the last carrots of last season (still in fine fettle, crunchy and sweet), and took a flyer and planted the first crop of the new season, sugar snap peas (a plant that, like me, likes it cool).  Thus, my gardening year came full circle today.

I have never before planted (or until this year, harvested!) in March. Inspiration came in February from a talk on year-round gardening at the Wisconsin Garden Expo, by Megan Cain, a pro gardener and gardening writer in Madison (https://www.creativevegetablegardener.com).

She said, “Plant peas in March. Try it.”  And so I did. If they don’t make it, I can replant in April. I’m assisting their March odds with a pair of old French doors that were recently replaced at the house. I planted the peas along a trellis, and leaned the doors against it, as sort of a mini bastard greenhouse.  I’ll let you now how these seeds of hope do.

With human connections now at a premium, it was satisfying to put my hands into of the dark hair of great mother Earth, and entrust these seeds to her care.  Simple good things, done regularly, can get us through, and keep our inner circles connected - and may be the only things that can.