Hold on Spring!

Spring is springing up all over, hopefully not too soon, and hopefully not before Winter doesn’t sock us one more time with below-freezing temperatures.

We dread those 32-degrees and below temps. That’s because all those things growing in my yard, and everyone else’s, has got spring fever too and erupted in a warm-weather flurry. My roses are leafing out like crazy, my climbing vines are climbing up anything they can wrap themselves around, my daffodils have been in bloom for a week (and pop right up again every time they get beat down by the rain), and all kinds of shrubs I buy on sale, but have no idea what they are, are bursting out all over with leaves.

But most frightening of all are the fruit trees. Good grief! Should my precious pear and peach trees really be blooming so early? They scare me. One good frost and it’s all over for pears and peaches at my house.

Both my yard’s flora and I have very bad cases of spring fever. I love Spring, even Oklahoma’s wet springs. I don’t even care that my yard looks like a frog pond right now, and no rain let-up seems to be in the future.

This year I have about the worst case of spring fever ever! Started haunting the garden centers way before they had anything on sale except left-over Christmas decorations. That may have been prompted by all the seed catalogs I ordered on line. Now there is a stack of them right next to my evening-sit-down-seat. I don’t order anything. I just like to catalog shop. 

But once the local shops got some seeds in I grabbed them up, and even planted. And lo and behold, the lettuce and the radish seeds have sprouted. I would have waited to plant the lettuce and the radishes, but one of the OETA shows I love – Oklahoma Gardening from OSU – recommended we go ahead and plant the cold-weather crops. What the heck. I did.

Oops! Now they’ve sprouted and I have to kneel down in the mud (yuck!) and thin those baby seedlings. OK. I’ll do it. But only because wilted lettuce and bacon salad is well worth the effort. It’s a recipe my mother taught me. And dad was the radish lover. Throw in a few tomatoes (yep, already bought some baby plants), and I’m done with vegetable gardening.

Flower gardening has my attention too, and, oh joy, all the flowers are breaking out of their brown winter doldrums and getting ready to do their bloom thing. Even the bulbs I stuck in the ground earlier are shooting up and blooming. Well, not all. That dang squirrel ate some of them. Oh I’ll try again. But the ones who have ignored the winter weather predictions are gorgeous. Now I’m wondering if I have enough tin cans and old milk cartons to cover them up if Winter decides to alight again and ruin what little my non-green thumb has accomplished.

Still, Spring fills our horizons once again, and, as Spring does, instills the hope that everything planted will fulfill our hopes for a beautiful garden.

After all, Spring does its own thing too. The redbuds have tinted the woods a lovely dark pink, and those wild plum trees (at least I think that’s what they are) decorate our Oklahoma woods like tiny clouds that have drifted down from the sky to lift our souls for a new warmth.

Hold on Spring. Keep Winter at bay, so we may rejoice in new growth.