Love Month brings us closer to Spring Gardening
Wildflower Garden Seeds
The best thing that happened in January is that we began to get colorful garden seed catalogs in the mail. Garden seed sellers still seem to send the colorful inspirational packages out each year. They’re great and I’m grateful.
A few years ago we had such a wonderful growing season!! My husband Dan planted 22 tomato plants. He loved having tomatoes, zucchini, green beans, asparagus and other garden delights to share without friends and neighbors.The hillside behind our home makes it wet later sometimes, but it was pretty dry and plenty of pigeon poop on the garden spot!Fortunately my husband lost his sense of smell completely a number of years ago, so it makes it easier for him to handle fertilizing the garden.
That reminds me, it is now 16 years since he was operated on for his Sino-nasal Undifferentiated Carcinoma. The neurological team removed the tumor that had grown up into the brain giving him a plutonium plate forehead. When they went to remove the right eye and the tumor, they found it wrapped around the optic nerve and couldn’t remove it.
Sadly they stitched him up and delivered the news to me that there was nothing more that they could do. That was in February 2004 and they said his end would be quick because the tumor was aggressive.
We are very grateful that it has now been 16 years since we got that prognosis. Happy Camp showed itself to be a heartwarming community of very caring people during that time, especially his coworkers at the Forest Service. We are very grateful to all our friends and neighbors and several Happy Camp Churches in town that held us p in prayer in those difficult times.
But back to gardening plans, we do have three cement raised beds (Wilson Forbes and Jefferson School students)in the back yard which can bring early crops of asparagus and things that can endure the chill of spring. But the garden has to be fairly dry and usually can’t be planted until mid-May. That’s an improvement from Bayfield, Wisconsin where my husband grew up with a huge family garden. His grandparents, Leo and Anna Nelson, had a huge garden and Dan loved to run the tiller for them whenever he could.
He also starred the day at 5 AM each morning delivering the Duluth News Tribune to all the subscribers in Bayfield on his bicycle. He waited at his grandparents home until papers were delivered on their front porch. Knowing the great homemade rolls his grandmother baked, I’m sure he enjoyed a hot treat before setting out on the paper route, especially up on the shore of Lake Superior where snow and cold are common! They say that the temperature of the largest freshwater lake in the world is 45 degrees at its warmest and no one ever drowns, as hypothermia would get you first.
So we are looking forward to getting the garden tilled and planted and finding it hard to be patient. But in good time, we will have all the salad fixin’s and all the vegetables, berries and goodies from the garden.