After the winds and snowfalls of March, how can April be most cruel?

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

T.S. Eliot's lyrical, poignant poetry in “The Waste Land” calls out the fourth month as the most unkind, with its echoes of memory and desire, its fragile promise of hope. For many impetuous gardeners like me, the cold, raw winds of March have sent us into less than poetic despair. We were poised to rush the season, ready to plant the peas and lettuce seeds, at least. Fleece jackets, flannel-lined jeans, thermal gloves, a red wool hat: we would have layered them on and stepped out into the chill. We might even have laughed at the wind, because we were outside again, sifting the dirt through our fingers, marking the rows, and feeling the first, quick flutter of gardening joy.

After waiting through a month of rain, and even a thunderstorm and a wet snowfall this week,I was finally – finally – zipping up my trusty gardening jacket when I stopped, with one sleeve still dangling. The first hint was my fingers, already turning red and stiff as I struggled with the jacket's zipper. Then I thought about the less subtle clues: Cold winds, rain-soaked ground, late winter snow. The Garden Goddess could not have been more clear if she had dropped a flashing red stoplight on my head.

I get it. It's not quite time yet. In this quixotic weather, the peas might drown, and the lettuce seeds could freeze. Even if I feel reckless with impatience, I have to consider the tiny, green plant lives I am honor-bound to protect. Those little seeds might be tough, but they are a weak match for a furious goddess when she's changing seasons. She is between acts, upstairs in her dressing room switching costumes, from winter's white velvet to spring's green-leafed muslin. My favorite mythical diva is not amused when she's caught in dishabille, with dripping hair and wearing a threadbare gray bathrobe.

So I have rehung my jacket on its hook near the garden door (at our house, every outside door leads to a garden,) and resigned myself to waiting awhile longer. In the meantime, I'm taking one last look through the seed and plant catalogs. I started with nearly fifty, which started dropping through our mail slot in December and are still trickling in. In February I did a serious editing of the catalog mountain and bought as many seed packets from local nurseries as possible. But there are always a few must-haves that I can't find here, so I ordered from garden companies with whom I've done business for years – including selectseeds.com for antique seeds, gurneys.com, territorial seed.com, and whiteflowerfarm.com. If March remains most cruel next week, and I have to wait to get out in the dirt, the more tempting the catalogs' color shots of vegetables and flowers become. I even start believing mine would look exactly like the pictures.

BadKitten for President update: Benjamin BadKitten, my imaginative (some, and I am one of them, might say delusional) Maine coon cat seems to be botching his campaign. Instead of crafting policy statements and catchy sound-bites, he's out after dark, catching field mice. (He lost my vote when he brought in a dead baby mouse, but gained my husband's support for eliminating one more small rodent from our neighborhood.) Instead of polishing his image as a mature, thoughtful leader, Benjamin is spending too much time at the food bowl, polishing off the last of the day's tuna. And his credibility as our future commander in chief took a major hit this week, during the rolling thunderstorm that seemed to hover over our house. Wannabe-President BadKitten opted to lead from under the footstool, where he huddled, whimpering, until the terrifying thunder finally faded. Then he slunk out on his belly from his retreat (he swore the Secret Service stuffed him under the footstool to protect him,) and mewed pitifully. I carried him with me to my reading chair, where he buried his head in my lap and trembled. Let us hope he would not repeat this unfortunate display of chicken-heartedness during a crisis in the Situation Room.

Sure an' we all have green thumbs today

March 17, 2013

Top o’this St. Patrick’s Day mornin’ to all you green thumbs, from an impetuous gardener who has a bit of blarney in her soul and in her pen.

I recently vowed not to do any more planting, especially of primroses, no matter how sunny the weather. Instead,planned to be outside, digging up quack grass from a bed I’d weeded too gently last spring. I kept half of that promise.

Last week I was shopping for birthday presents for our little grandsons and walked past an indoor sales display of primroses. I stopped (of course) and admired those cheerful little plants – and then gave my shopping cart an energetic push and kept moving toward the toy department. On the way back to the checkout stand, I happened to pass the primrose display. (Okay, I took a three-aisle detour to see them again.) But I take seriously any promise I make to readers. I did not buy the primroses, even though there were a few rare, double-ruffled ones in an old-fashioned magenta shade that I remember from my grandmother’s garden. (Not, of course, that it was difficult to walk away from them.)

I broke the other half of the promise – digging quack grass – because of a beastly cold and fever. An afternoon of heavy weeding would have left me unfit to teach Sunday School to a class of fabulous teenagers o, afterward, to direct a rehearsal for a musical I wrote for them. Weeds can wait; children and teenagers come first.

The combination of gloomy cold symptoms and a week of grey skies left me feeling that I needed to find a bit of springtime soon. I didn’t have to search far. In a flower bed at the edge of our patio, the tips of tulip bulbs peeked up. In a brick planter on the planter, green shoots of two clematis vines promised another summer of exotic beauty. I also found signs of spring-flowering bulbs rising from their winter mulch blankets in our front-yard gardens, and hollyhocks, jaunty with their Irish-green leaves, ready for their more fragile spring cousins to join them later in the season.

Although we’re still getting some snowfalls here in northern Idaho, spring seems to be fighting back harder against the lingering winter. The snow melts quickly now, instead of piling up in drifts or calling for an early-morning shoveling. Finches perch daily on our feeders, and robins have breakfast on our lawn. Our Lenten roses (hellebores) are nearly ready to flower on the front-porch planter. And I’m nearly ready to start organizing the 84,000 seed packets I seem to have bought during the winter. This, I know, is the first step toward spring for me. I will wait, as patiently as an impetuous gardener is capable of waiting.

Last week I received a lovely email from a reader, who asked for gardening advice. (Only professional restraint keeps me from adding a bouquet of exclamation points to the end of that sentence. Very few people ask me for gardening advice, especially if they read my newspaper column or my blog regularly.)

Part of the reader’s email seems especially apt for St Patrick’s Day. He noted that his family has a shamrock plant that has been blooming nonstop since September 2008, and he wondered if this was an odd occurrence. I did some research and replied that indoor shamrock plants do tend to bloom well, compared to outdoor shamrocks, which can be more erratic in their flowering. My own view is that my reader not only has a green thumb, but a thumb as green as the emerald hills of Ireland.

Because we all have a bit of Irish joy and warmth in us today, this Italian Irishwoman wishes you an Irish blessing:

May you always have walls for the winds,
a roof for the rain, tea beside the fire,
laughter to cheer you, those you love near you,
and all your heart might desire.

And may your thumb stay green throughout the gardening season.

My favorite furball's voting No on remodeling project

March 12, 2016

Our remodeling project has started, and crews are scheduled here for at least the next month. Most members of our household have adjusted fairly quickly to the occasional clamor of pounding, sawing, and sanding drifting upstairs, as a bathroom gets gutted and refitted. My husband, Lee, is finishing the painting on our main bathroom, and I've finished packing most of the kitchen, which will get a small face-lift after the bathroom is done. Last month I filled our freezer with homemade dinners, knowing that our kitchen soon will be off-limits. The stove (which won't be operable), refrigerator and microwave will move temporarily into the dining room, and I'll set up a camp kitchen for Lee and me in there.

I don't actually know what a camp kitchen looks like. In all my many decades, I've gone camping and slept in a tent only once, when I was a teenager. During that unforgettable weekend, a spider visited my sleeping bag and bit me on the face. I learned then that spider bites can make your face swell, redden and hurt. On our last day at the lake, my friend tried to tow her parents' motor boat out of the water and ended up drowning her family's station wagon. All five of us teenage girls were in the station wagon as it started to sink. I helped pull my terrified friend, who could not swim, out the backseat window and towed her to shore.

Good times – so good and so deeply memorable that I have never gone camping again. But I'm fine with making do in our dining room, heating thawed, homemade dinners, making fresh salads (the fridge will be plugged in,) and doing dishes in the bathtub. I am a hardy woman of Idaho now, after all. As long as I can microwave water for hot tea, I will smile and carry on.

One family member, however, already is feeling the stress, and has let us know that this remodeling project has severely disrupted his life and his political future. As soon as Benjamin BadKitten, our black and brown Maine coon cat, heard the first whine of a power saw, he squashed himself under an armchair in the living room. He emerged hours later, long after the crew had left for the day, looking wild-eyed and flat-eared.

I picked him up and let him settle onto my lap, from where he informed me that his campaign for president of the United States has reached a critical point. To me, that point needs to sharpen and poke my BadKitten gently in the butt, so he will decide to shed his latest delusion, along with his excess winter fur. Benjamin has already received seven promises of write-in votes, to try to head off Him Who Must not Be Named from taking his party's nomination. If that cat gains more supporters, we're going to have to file financial disclosure documents and print up some yard signs.

The next day, I closed off the kitchen from the rest of the house while a crew member measured the counter tops. After I cut off the kitchen access, I saw Benjamin flattening himself under a table in the living room . (He said he was doing his yoga stretches.) A few minutes later, I heard very loud cheeping noises and hurried back into the living room to find out the source of the sound. My BadKitten was crouched in front of a narrow space between a wall and a bookshelf. His fat tail was flicking fast.

 

A small chickadee, cornered and still chirping, struggled to squeeze behind the bookshelf. I scooped up Benjamin and shut him into my study, then carefully set the little bird into my hand and carried it outdoors. I have no idea how Benjamin brought a live bird into the house when his only open entrance – the cat door in the kitchen – was blocked off. And my cat wasn't offering any explanations. The most I could get out of him was a sly, feline smile. With smoke-and-mirrors skills like that, he might fit into the political scene all too well.

Unless my favorite furball can persuade me to start canvassing the neighborhood for him, I plan to spend some time in my garden this coming week, planting early spring vegetable and flower seeds and clearing the remaining fallen leaves from the flower beds. I've been checking the gardens daily, looking for new plant growth and whispering thanks to the Garden Goddess for protecting the tender perennials through the winter. Crocus, the garden's own Easter eggs, already are blooming purple, white and yellow. Tulip and daffodil bulbs are showing more of their green leaves every day, happy in the chilly sunshine. The oriental poppies promise another flamboyant fashion show in a few months, when they will flower in shades of red, purple, pink, watermelon, white and orange. This week, I'll also do some scatter-planting of flower seeds, especially the “bread seed” poppy seeds I saved from last summer's blooms. In this in-between season, I'm feeling ready for spring.

My backyard shrubs will bloom –--- but what about the sickly grass?

March 5, 2016

On a recent cold, raw day, I looked out onto our backyard and imagined how it will look this spring and summer. The weigela, hibiscus, honeysuckle, lilacs, forsythia and wild roses will be blooming in pale pink, deep red, lavender blue, fragrant white, sunny yellow, and old-fashioned magenta. The great, leafy branches of the hawthorn tree will shelter singing, chirping birds. Tall sunflowers will turn their faces to the sky, and hollyhocks and sweet peas will add color along the fences. On the patio, tomato plants in big green pots will flower and bear fruit (I desperately hope.) And our backyard lawn will stumble into its summer hangover: brown grass, nearly dead and studded with weeds and nettles.

Faithful readers know I tend to be an optimist about all things garden-esque, but the state of our lawn tempts me to remember all the bad words I do not say. Nearly six years of hard use by two big dogs (now only one) has left the grass patchy, shredded, dying, yellowed, and overrun by weeds that seem to share the same death-defying genes as cockroaches and BadKittens. Our lawn is an annual eyesore. My husband mows it regularly, but we don't irrigate it during the dry months, because it just feels wrong to waste water. We haven't spent time or money on fertilizing, reseeding or weed-killing because our elderly Old English sheepdog, Rags, would lumber outside and pee all over the newly seeded soil. Simply barbecuing the cash, instead of investing it on lawn care, would be quicker and more cost-effective. (We could toast marshmallow over the flames as the dollar bills turned to smoke.)

It's been too cold and rainy lately to do any late-winter gardening, so I've had even more time than usual to think about garden projects. The backyard disaster of our lawn has risen to the top of my thoughts and left my brain thundering. What if we (meaning my husband) built raised beds in the backyard, added gravel paths, and did away with most of the lawn? I broached this idea to Lee last weekend and then sat back as his builder's mind considered and engaged. It didn't take long. Curved paths, he said, with the path-side of each raised bed also curved to follow the lines. I loved it already. But can you fill the new beds? Lee asked me.

Several springtimes ago, he built eight fabulous wooden, raised beds in our side yard, including a big, tiered central planter for flowers. I have grown vegetables in the rectangular beds every summer, always with mixed results, crop-wise, but with joy and hope every time. Of course, I'll be able to fill the new beds, too. I can plant a kitchen garden of lettuces, peas, beans, zucchini, broccoli, carrots – maybe even corn, if the weevils can't find the new corn patch.

So what would you plant in the beds we already have in the side yard? Lee asked. I just looked at him for a moment. I would plant more flowers, I said finally, and barely stifled myself from adding: Duh. More roses. An old-fashioned cottage garden. A cutting garden. Lee raised his hand in a stop sign. Got it, he said. I beamed at him, hesitated, and then went for it. Do you think you could start on the new raised beds this spring? He answered, with great patience, Absolutely. Just as soon as I finish painting the walls of our bathroom, the walls and ceiling of the downstairs bath, sanding and painting the cupboards, drawers and woodwork in our bathroom, painting the kitchen cupboards' doors, and hanging the flower art you want in the kitchen. (He also has a full-time job as managing editor of the Moscow-Pullman Daily News.)I thanked him, hugged him, and went out to buy more flower and vegetable seeds.

BadKitten for President update: After the results of Super Tuesday earlier this week, my fluffy, black and brown Maine coon cat Is ready for the pleading to begin. Any day he expects to hear party bigwigs beg him to accept a draft as the only candidate who can stop Him Who Must Not Be Named. The BadKitten is already racking up some promises of write-in votes from readers of my Impetuous Gardener blog. While he awaits the call to serve his country, Benjamin is considering a few changes to the Oval Office. Job One will be a new litter box, embossed with the presidential seal.

My life's quilt is filled with many colorful squares – and I can't even sew

February 27,2016

A handmade quilt with multiple squares, colorful fabrics and creative designs: This is the way I see my life. Maybe you have a similar image for yours Often, we probably wish we could beam all our energy onto only one, solid-color quilt. Instead, we have to manage our time, to take care of all the fabric squares that make up our lives. My quilt includes squares for husband and family, writing, volunteer work with children and teenagers, reading, attention-demanding cats, cooking and, of course, impetuous gardening.

I'm using a sewing metaphor here because it's the image I saw in my mind, not because I am a seamstress. Anything beyond sewing on a button or hemming a skirt is too much pressure. In my junior high home economics class, my sewing teacher made a ceremony of presenting me with my own personal seam ripper. “You're going to need this tool – often – if you decide to take up a needle anywhere outside this classroom,” she said. She was sort of smiling, but not too sincerely.

This week I've been resisting the urge to spend all my time in the garden, clearing away the last of the wet leaves, celebrating the emerging shoots of the perennial plants for a new season, clipping the dead stalks I didn't get to last fall, and just finding joy in the brisk air and late winter sunshine. But I have more quilt squares to attend to, the most complex of which is preparing for an upcoming home improvement project in our kitchen and bathrooms.

Most of the work will be done by professionals, but my husband, Lee, with help from our son-in-law and our son, is doing all the painting and most of the demolition work. This involves a sledge hammer, pry bar, and aching muscles. My job is to box up everything in our kitchen and bathrooms. I've packed and labeled fourteen boxes from the kitchen and have at least that many to go – not including the essential dinnerware, utensils, canned and dry goods we'll need during the temporary exile into the dining room.

So I settled on a plan for the week: Spent all afternoon last Friday, Saturday and Sunday in the garden; on Monday did a big honkin' load of cooking and freezing homemade meals for our dinners while the kitchen is off limits; on Tuesday wrote my column, made a special dinner, and welcomed our son's visit from Seattle; spent time with my toddler granddaughter Wednesday morning, then packed more kitchen boxes before leading two youth groups at church that night; did laundry and more packing Thursday and Friday, and then finished the week with the reward of another day in the garden.

Cups of tea and chapters of books are always the colorful stitches that connect the squares of my quilt. Every afternoon I eat a light lunch and spend half an hour, finishing my tea and reading at least one chapter of my current “living room book.” Do other readers also have books they read in company and books they read before bedtime? I've kept the pattern of two books going simultaneously for decades, and can switch easily between the plots and writing styles. Without the comforting routine of tea and fiction, and my week's action plan, my life's quilt would quickly have started to fray and fade.

BadKitten for President update: A recent blog post noted my Maine coon cat's decision to bow to public acclaim and become a national presidential candidate. But since then, I've sensed Benjamin's reluctance to get off his ample hind end and plunge into the frenzied world of donors, speeches, meet-and-greets, debates and interviews. He suffered a setback early on, when his best shot at a high-dollar donation fizzled. My husband did not think a contribution to the “A Bird in Every Tummy! Vote BadKitten” super PAC would be a prudent financial investment. So, without the prospect of big bucks, my favorite long-tailed, non-politician is considering suspending his (nonexistent) campaign to spend more time with his family. On hearing that, Lee is considering opening his wallet. A traveling BadKitten means an absent BadKitten.