It’s April. Spring has arrived, at last! I picture a scene of pastoral promise: The ground is being tilled…furrows dug, seeds sown. Gentle rains fall, quenching the thirst of bright green sprouts… I may as well imagine a rainbow up there somewhere.
Reality check…
This is Minnesota. It’s 35 degrees and windy.
Our gardens are inside where it’s warm.
My friends and neighbors plant their seeds inside, in trays of tidy, parallel lines in April. They light them up with hanging fluorescent “grow” lights. They water them each morning, so by May, the little sprouts will poke their noses out of the soil. In June they will be transplanted into real, outside gardens, to grow during our two good months of summer. By August, everything is so hot and dry that the plants get baked into the parched and crusted earth, just before the Autumn freeze. That’s right about when Winter shows up for another 9 month stay.
If you blink, you’ll miss the whole growing season.
This year, I outsmarted the whole system. The kids and I planted our garden in January.
Okay, maybe it had nothing to do with smart. We just were bored with a bad case of cabin fever, so we got out the seeds and dirt and had ourselves some fun. Watching seeds sprout up and grow was much more exciting than watching snowflakes fall and accumulate into mountains. And we didn’t have to shovel it. So anyway, now it is April, and our garden has grown.
And guess what?
Just like nearly everything else in Minnesota, it grew up to be Norwegian.
Tall, thin and pale.
If the little kids’ feather pollination works, we should have spaghetti squash and tomatoes and corn on the cob by Mother’s Day. Maybe we’ll get to carve pumpkins on the Fourth of July, before snow comes again.
In the meantime, Happy Spring!
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