I love the early spring garden, when there are only a few plants and the ground is clear and brown, a dark rectangle within the grassy green; the geometry is clear, before profuse vegetable growth obscures it.
I've been planting this week: potatoes, early beets and carrots, various greens.
The peas, planted back in March, have begun to show their delicate tendrils, which will help them rise and cling to the fence as they grow.
The spinach is still small and young, but soon I'll be having thinnings for salads...
along with lettuce and arugula, protected in a cold frame from the recent chilly weather.
A row of young garlic waves its strappy leaves from a covering of hay.
And here hay covers some newly planted carrot seeds, to keep them moist during their long germination. There is the golden hay, and some rows of green, and scatterings of green weeds, but mainly it is the earth that is showing. This is a time of promise; a time to dream of bumper crops, weedless and insect free, before the complex reality of the growing season emerges.
I, too, love the new spring gardens. But tucked into a hemlock forest, its the unfurling of all the ferns and the moss garden looking like it is tended by Japanese monks - before all the star flowers take it over. Somehow I just cant bring myself to week out the sweet woodland flowers, but love the mosses when they are in their spring Zen moment! Happy growing!!
ReplyDeleteYour moss garden sounds beautiful, Valerianna. I love mosses of all sorts. I hope the recent rains will restore them to health after a terribly dry spring here in Vermont.
DeleteYes, they've appreciated the rains a lot.... well, the whole forest here glistens and sparkles after a rainstorm. Its a hemlock forest, with ferns and mosses everywhere, and there's the most exquisite color combinations after rain as the red efts (which are really more orange to my eye) come out and wander over the mosses. Wonderful oragne and green!
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