I am decidedly not a gardener, and yet every year right around the time winter is loosening its grip, making reluctant way for spring, I get the urge to plant and dig and tuck tiny seeds away to await them bursting into life.
Granted, most of the time those seeds don’t make it (see opening line), but that never stops me from wanting to try again.
In the past couple of years, we’ve done container gardens.
We never got much of a harvest from them, but the bits of food that did survive always felt like such triumph. Hurrah! One pea plant! A few tiny tomatoes at the end of the year, when everyone else’s were finished! Two peppers, shrunken and shriveled! And a handful of lettuce leaves the slugs didn’t devour. We are gods!
Living here, we don’t even have that option. There are small garden plots available for each building, but nobody (including our RLCs) seems to know who is in charge of allotting them, or what you have to do to get one. We had thought about joining a CSA, but surprise! You have to do that during the winter. All the spaces are already filled. So we will have to rely on farmers markets for our produce, and I will continue to make all our acquaintances think I’m crazy by cooing at the budding flowers by our front door every time I go in or out.
Spring fever. It makes us all a little crazy, especially if we’ve no outlet.
I feel that way every spring, too. I’m lucky to have my own place though. I was so excited to get out last week– I’d been down with a cold for awhile, but breathing in that fresh dirt smell just felt so great. But I probably overdid it because then I ended up with a sinus infection, but what.
Ah well, you win some, you lose some.