Back in early February I got an email from my oldest daughter Trum that turned me green as a grasshopper. The temperatures in Sweet Home, Oregon were in the 70's, the daffodils were blooming, and Trum had spent the day planting the vegetable garden. I turned greener than a garter snake the following week when my youngest, Tam, wrote boasting about azaleas and tulips in bloom and the 80 degree temperatures in New Orleans.
Here in New England about the only February occupations we gardeners have are fussing over houseplants, studying the seed catalogs and starting seeds indoors. I start my seeds in the cellar. It's so cold down there I have to wear a coat. My flats, on the other hand, sit on an electric blanket and warmed by a "grow light." I find filling flats with store-bought dirt doesn't compare with getting out in the real dirt. And although watching the first tiny sprouts of greenery appear is exciting, it's not half as satisfying as transplanting those seedlings to the garden when warm weather finally arrives.
And that warm weather is still a long way off. I didn't see my first robin until yesterday. And come April, we don't get spring, we get mud season. Webster defines mud as "1.A slimy, sticky fluid-to-plastic mixture of finely divided particles of solid material and water. 2.The foulest or vilest part; the offscourings." I don't know as I'd go that far, but mud can be a pretty unpleasant item for the gardener.
The sap in a gardener's veins is always ready to flow at the first sign of a crocus in bloom, however, so let's look at the projects that can be done during mud season. On Locust Hill, the first chore is cleaning up the yard. Our driveway is edged with lawns and as a consequence they're scattered with pebbles and clods of dirt from the snowplow. One of the few things Hank could do this winter was driving the tractor so he eagerly plowed every time we had the slightest bit of snow, leaving snow piles full of driveway pebbles everywhere. Ah, well, men and their toys.
The other lawns on Locust Hill contains dog bones, tree branches, fountains of rich black dirt pushed up by underground water, and "dog fertilizer," the results of two dogs too lazy to go out through the snow to the meadow.
A more pleasant occupation to do in mud season is weeding. The frost has just come out of the ground so pulling grass out of the pachysandra beds actually gets the roots. This doesn't work at any other time of year. Weeds are easily pulled from flower beds as well. That bratty little chick weeds that gets such a head start in the perennial border comes up at the slightest tug. So do the bedstaws, their sprawl of orange roots coming out of the ground with ease.
The one problem with weeding in mud season is the mud. Kneeling in the mud requires washing mud-soaked jeans every day or putting down something to kneel on. I find a car mat the most practical. Gardeners who don't have bad backs (are there any out there?) may be able to weed without kneeling, but those of us with back problems must have good knees. Back in 1980 when my back started to give me grief, I learned to fall on my knees at the slightest provocation. Not to pray, mind you, but to make the bed, open a drawer, take the ashes out of the woodstove, and anything else that requires bending, especially working in the garden.
Lots of gardeners clean up their flower beds in the fall, cutting down the dead stalks of various perennials and uprooting dead annuals. That's what I did until the year I came home from England so crippled up from a head-on collision (driving on the right or wrong side of the road) that I couldn't do it. The following spring I discovered that instead of cutting down the tall stalks of phlox, daisies, beebalm and asters with a clipper, I could grab a whole handful and break them off. The only stems that require a clipper are the peonies.
So that's another job I do during mud season. I spread well-rotted manure between plants and work it into the soil as I pull up the weeds. I also pull up the plants that have become too invasive. Those little rosettes of evening primrose that spread so fast grow up to put too much yellow in the garden. The beebalm, or monarda, is another pushy plant. Each year the old plants seem to die out as new ones form a short way off, but if these new plants gobble up space that belongs to other perennials…. And much as I like the handsome silvery gray of Artemisia, its greedy roots would take over the entire garden if I let them. Fortunately they're easy to get rid of just after the frost has left the ground.
If you haven't cleaned out last year's nests from your birdhouses, that definitely needs to be done before the birds start house hunting. Planting peas, however, is a questionable job. I find that if I plant too early, my pea seeds usually rot in all the wet or take so long to sprout that I think they've rotted, in which case I plant more and end up with too many. I prefer to plant in late April.
I'm not sure who is going to do all these mud season jobs this year. By the time you read this column I will be in sunny New Orleans with all three of my daughters. We are planning to spend an entire week playing tennis and bridge, two of my favorite pastimes. In other years we've only managed the tennis, but this summer they all learned to play bridge. What more could a mother ask for?
A picture of mud season on Locust Hill seemed too dreary to use for this article so I've put up August locusts reflected in our peaceful pond.
