A treat for everyone who reads the blog today – two pieces from Slim Randles. Both deal with Spring and the joy of discovering new life in nature. Now is a time for planting and going outside to discover what treasures Spring is bringing us.
Enjoy the read.
Spring mornings are a lot like Christmas. Each day we get up and go out into the yard, or walk along the creek or visit the horses in the pasture. And each day, each morning, we find something new the sun has brought us.
Pinfeather leaves of an unbelievable green now start showing on cottonwoods that have stood like stark ghostly frames all through the cold winter. Hopeful blades of grass peek through clumps of brown left over from last summer’s verdant pasture. Everywhere we look there is something new and different.
A lot of this Christmas-in-spring is kept just among us, because we might be accused of being … well … poetic if we told people why we were really carrying that coffee cup out into the yard. So we say lame things like “I think I’ll get some of that fresh air this morning.” What we really mean, of course, is “I want to see if Richardson’s bay mare has had that foal yet.”
Some of us have worked very hard last fall and winter to prepare for this spring. By grafting. OK, we have a Granny Smith apple tree. Let’s see if we can’t get a branch of Rome Beauties or Jonagolds to grow on it, too. And we understand completely that where we live no olive tree can survive the winter. That isn’t supposed to stop us from trying, is it?
Nature pitches us a boatload of challenges each day that we’re alive. This plant needs more water than falls naturally here. That tree can’t take the temperatures we get. This little tree needs soil with more organic matter in it.
And those challenges are the stuff winter dreams are made of. We do the best we can to cure the lack, the freeze, the drought, and then we wait for April. We wait impatiently until we can come out of the house some morning and check the grafts on the apple tree and see tiny green leaves coming on the grafted branch. We search the bare ground where we planted that new kind of seed that won’t grow here – to see if it’ll grow here.
It is a continuing feast of green, a triumph of anticipation.
An April morning can make us want to sing.
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Because Slim always has a tagline that he asks we print along with the column, the one for this first column is included:
Brought to you by your friends at your local animal shelter. Go find a brand-new best friend.
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We have a master gardener in our family. Two, actually. My wife, Catherine, and her identical twin, Eleanor. These women spent a whole year studying stuff like how to grow things that you’d like to have and how to avoid growing things that turn your stomach.
Catherine is really active in the group and volunteers to find volunteers. Hey, you can ask. She loves doing it, and I’m kinda an occasional tag-a-long.
We went to a pruning clinic just the other day to learn how to prune grapevines. We listened, took pictures, and snipped things off that looked to me like they belonged where we found them.
Shows what I know.
At home we prepared to give our own grapevine a thorough inspection to see about things like new growth, arms, bumps on the arms, all that stuff that knowledgeable gardeners who attend pruning clinics learn.
It’s a wild grapevine that began life in a canyon up in the fairly nearby desert mountains. I, being a know-nothing gardener, wrenched it from its ground and planted it in the side yard here at the house. That was about 20 years ago. Since that time, it has flourished, having reached out to our neighbors to the south, and consumed everything in its path that held still long enough.
So out we went to our tiny little part of the viticultural world, just outside the office window a little way, and the vine exploded in our faces as a mama white-winged dove blasted out of there to a neighbor’s tree. After undergoing self CPR, we looked and there was a tiny nest of twigs in the top of the grapevine. With two little eggs sitting quietly, waiting for Mom to come home.
I don’t care how much our “vineyard” needs it, there will be no pruning on it without the full blessing of The Family Dove.
Maybe next year.
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Brought to you by Max Evans, the First Thousand Years, by Slim Randles. Available in bookstores and online from UNM Press.
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That’s all from me for today, folks. If you are playing in dirt and planting things, I hope you find joy. Be safe. Be Happy. Be kind.
