The Month of Wind and Taxes

Indoors or out, no one relaxes
In March, that month of wind and taxes,
The wind will presently disappear,
The taxes last us all the year.~Ogden Nash (1902–1971), "Thar She Blows"  [Tax Day used to be March 15th from 1918 through 1954, not April 15th as we know it today. —tεᖇᖇ¡·g]

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade. ~Charles Dickens (1812–1870), Great Expectations

“Only those with tenacity can march forward in March” 
― Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

The first sweet potato cuttings of the season came in looking like a wilted lettuce salad.  And this was the sweet potato that was delivered.  Another four hundred plants were ordered...and then cancelled.  Was this sudden shortfall of ornamental sweet potato due to the unanticipated bankruptcy of one of our favorite sources for cutting raised plants?  Analogous to the accordion effect one car in a thousand braking for a daredevil squirrel.has on three lanes of congested traffic.  Or is it just Nature's way of reminding me that it goes against the order of the world as created by Almighty God to expect summery plants like Marguerite and Blackie to thrive...or even grow!... before the Ides of March. What I'm saying is there is a natural order that waits for some signal from the sun and the earth even if the the man maintained environment all around seems ideal.  The tomato seeds I plant in February are a little reluctant to emerge compared to those planted when the days grow longer...even though they are all planted in a room with light twenty four hours a day!  Never ceases to amaze and mystify...

The Timehop tells of March madness past: the snow days with grandkids at play in empty greenhouse bays and at work transplanting, or watering, or even getting a haircut.  There are lists four foot long and towers ten foot high that correlate with sun rise shots before the equinox and sunset pictures after the spring forward. And water, water everywhere: an irrigation boom making its slow crawl down the bay like an April thunder shower on the western horizon, a water wand seemingly suspended in mid air while the photographer acts as deux machina. As March marches, water is the driver; a multitude of baby plants cries for water like hatchlings in a nest.  Strapping teenage transplants are drama queens, wilting under an afternoon sunspot.  The curve for water in March is an increase at an increasing rate: in math terms, exponential.

February may have set records in northern Missouri, but our truckload of potting soil apparently originated somewhere so far north that the middle of each bale was more akin to permafrost than peat-lite mix.  The guys filling pots climbed inside the bale breaker with a sharp edged spade, but the biggest chunks still lie outside like over-sized Idaho potatoes awaiting the oven.  Matt stuck his finger into one this afternoon, gauging its temperature, and declaring it 'done' and ready to be scooped back into the dirt machine. We are expecting another truckload on Monday, the fourth of the year, and hope against hope that this bunch will be thawed.

Two weeks to go in March and two greenhouse remain unopened, without heat or plants.  Blake has begun his familiar March refrain:"I don't think we are going to need all this space."..."Why did we build that new greenhouse?"....and...just for variety.."I think we can turn one of these empty greenhouses into a batting cage!"  We tolerate this humor now, but by April 1st, there will be hundreds of flats of tomatoes and the flowers for three different school fundraisers awaiting transplant and we will be deciding how narrow a walkway one can navigate with two feet and 150' of garden hose. As the tension mounts, the sense of humor shrinks...another mathematical function increasing at an increasing rate! Two in one blog post...imagine that!

When we unwrap the box from Botany Lane containing the two trays of succulents, we can't help oohing and aahing and patting the trays.  Baby succulents are like puppies; everyone loves them and no one can resist them.  The difference is that succulents remain cute and never drag the clothes off the line....

The first soybeans in Atchison county have cracked the surface.  Everyone I know is curious about the soybeans in pots we are growing for a fundraiser.  I am too.  How many soybean plants does it take to make some tofu?  Are these beans going to grace a salad?  Be a snack?  Is edamame going to become a household word?    And the same goes for the stevia cuttings...another new crop for Hurst Greenery.  So unfamiliar, we didn't recognize them when we unpacked them.  For your information, they look a lot like lobelia as a plug...

The perfume of pansies meets me at the door of the annex, a sure sign that we are on the cusp of spring.  Is any flower more lovely than a pansy face?  Be-whiskered, blushing, brilliant and bold or subtly shaded, I suppose it's just as well they flourish only in the cool season, else we should shun every other flower with a lesser palette.

“AND what is so rare as a day in June?
Then, if ever, come perfect days;
Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune,
And over it softly her warm ear lays;
Whether we look, or whether we listen,
We hear life murmur, or see it glisten;”

No one would dream of applying James Russell Lowell's paean in praise of June to March.  And yet...and yet....on a bright and breezy Sunday afternoon when the watering is done, payroll complete, and our tummies full of another great St. Paul's Spring Dinner, it is possible to imagine Heaven leaning down to watch kids on bikes, or throwing baseballs, fathers and sons sitting in lawn chairs by their backyard campfire, golfers out for the first time, and gardeners peeking at the crabapple trees or picking up sycamore limbs. 

There might even be kids fishing with a stick for moss....and rocks....barefoot like its the first of July.

March can be rare like that.

On the Front Lines of the Season

Today's project requires a drive from home to Jefferson City, accompanied by 550 plus of our most fragrant and tender friends in the back of the Explorer, thirty or so flats of Matrix Mix and Matrix Ocean pansies. Their blooms are three inches across and, if you'll forgive my fancy, their "faces" seem to be frank and open and unswerving as the break of day. They spent the night exhaling in the car, greeting us with a warm breath of fragrance and humidity in the morning.

We drove in driving rain for three hours. It drained away before our destination, but my spirits drooped when I saw geese swimming on the pooled waters on the Missouri River bottom outside Jeff.

On the surface, the flower beds looked pretty good!

But reality set in as soon as my spade bit into the ground. Every hole for a plant became a...

..... pansy pond.....
Now I'm a long ways from my college soils classes, but even a wee bit of gardening experience, much less the decades I've accumulated, tells me these are not ideal planting conditions. Saturation, compaction, collapse of soil structure? Let me count the ways.....

And...oh yeah, I planted them all anyway. Every passerby told me what a nasty day it was to plant,but I didn't choose the day; it chose me.

Like they always say, you fight with the army you have. May my pansy volunteers overcome the odds against them, flutter their brave spring flowers against the elements, and cheer all that pass through...

Posted with Blogsy

March-ing, March-ing

If this is Wednesday..

...then it must be VanDewetering and Ball Tagawa. And all this before noon.

This is Matt's workload. For one week. This week. Three thousand flats in seven days. One hundred and eight thousand little plants to pick up, put down, tag, water in. It is not quite as big as the national debt, but unlike our fiscal situation, it must be dealt with. This week. It's March.

Just last week, there was room to roam. Just last week, Josh could put up the Little Tykes play house and watch movies inside on his dad's Kindle. Just last week we could leave extra hanging baskets to sit on the ground and grow and put off deciding where we would hang them. Today I thread 75 feet of three quarter inch hose between the lines, but from here on out, we won't rely on my agility; it will be up to the irrigator to keep the seedlings moist.

In greenhouse after greenhouse, the flats ooze toward the door as inexorably as the tide coming in. The great green stream flows from trays of plugs or cuttings plush as carpet, to be counted by 15s, by 18s, by 36s, as the ranks of tags line up across the floor. 

One of the mysteries hidden deep within the psyche of a seed is what makes it "know"when the calendar page turns to March.  Critical growth energy is achieved; tomato seeds that languished for at least a week in the seed room in February sudden shake off their languor and leap from the soil in 5 days or less in the exact same environment.  In February it is three weeks to transplant size; by April, it will be two.  Tomatoes seeded April 1 will be headed to Midwestern gardens before Mother's Day.  The essence of spring condenses, compresses, then uncontrollably erupts in the greenhouse in March after the equinox.

 Tiny, but tough, the little vegetables pack a fragrant punch as we move them from plug tray to pot.  A lucky few are patted in gently by Abbie one day after school.

 The back of the number 10 house presents a prospect of geraniums as far as the eye can see.

 Even though we are anxious for color and applaud their enthusiastic growth,

it is time to fill the pots with good roots.  Blooms now use valuable energy that should be directed to foliage and roots.  There is ample time to grow a good show for April sales. My hands are sticky and orange and smell of the faintly rosy aroma of geraniums as I gather my bouquet of early bloomers.

Not every day is rosy.  Our mechanical aides de camp break down. A broken chain on the bale breaker under the laws of nature occurs when the machine is full of soil mix. Parts are in Tennessee, so Ryan jury rigs a new link while Lee and I scoop pots to the aroma of welded metal and hot peat moss.  It is a warm day with low low humidity; ladies that would ordinarily be transplanting grab a hose and lemonade is made of lemons.

And here it is....the first fruits of the harvest, the first flower sales of Spring 2014.  A Monday afternoon with calm air and mellow weather allows us to load three cartloads of pansies in the trailer for delivery.  

It doesn't happen that often in March.  But like the geese flying overhead these chilly mornings, it is a harbinger....

of all the multitudes to come.

Is it spring yet?

Posted with Blogsy

A Date with February

So now, its February.  In my kitchen, February looks like this:

Warm, molten even, with an inner glow.

And this is the kind of calendar that rules my life.  Brutally concise, Puritanical, rigid, unyielding.

Ecclesiastes 3:1 To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:

2 A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;


For this is February and the inexorable timetable necessarily rules.  Without order in February, abandon hope, all ye who enter March.

It is February when the potting mix stacked like so many Cubist icebergs outside must thaw.  It takes days.....and a time to every purpose....for these

to be transformed into these....

.....then packed into crates and unloaded four by four into a greenhouse to warm.

We stir in slow release fertilizer because this light fluffy mix has great drainage and water holding capacity, is weed and disease free, but it isn't soil, it just acts like it.

We water the baskets down to moisten the mix through the whole pot and break the dry crust on top.  This time we plant four little begonia plugs, urging them out of the plug trays gently to preserve as many roots as we can, nestling them in the soil carefully so they won't drown when we water them in....

with an old stiff hose that probably looks something like this.  The well water is as cold as ...well, name your poison. Until the ground floor of the greenhouses absorbs enough sunshine, the water will be frigid, the hoses will be recalcitrant and the subject of mild cussing.

After the baskets are well watered and before we hang them, we check the leaders on the basket lines to make sure they aren't plugged by algae, dead insects or spider webs..

From this point, the hanging baskets will be watered 50 at a time...

It's February....a time to plant....some spicy Garden Salsa peppers...

or some early cauliflower.

.Some sweet Big Berthas with the seeder or some Romas and Supersweet 100s destined to be the earliest tomatoes on the block....

To every thing there is a season.....it is February.  Still winter in this country.  The groundhog mails his prediction in without opening his eyes.  We shed our hats, scarves, gloves, coats and sodden boots 'neath the radiator in the kitchen, hoping they will be not just warm, but please, please, dry when we pull them on in the morning.  

But....turn, turn, turn, one fine day the sun begins to turn the drive to mud, the drifts to puddles, the white to brown.  We shed some layers.  The car thermometer confirms hard fact to our hopeful senses.

And we are not the only living things to come to life, to unfold...

...to bloom..

and recognize, realize, rejoice and begin to count down the waning days of February.