Spring has sprung
This past week spring began here in Arkansas and it was more than just a passing of the equinox. Trees began to leaf out, my pear and peach trees started to flower, and insects from wasps to carpenter bees emerged from their winter hiding to begin the busy work of another season. My own work has become busy as well. I have been planting cauliflower, broccoli, spinach, greens, and herbs in the warming soil. I’ve been cutting the quickly growing grass, forbs, and legumes that have begun to thicken around my planting beds. And Friday, I saw my first scissor-tailed flycatcher of the season, a neo-tropical migrant that had just returned from a winter in South or Central America.
This is a season of growth and rebirth and beginning—and it feels like all of those. Spring is another chance to start over after the mistakes of last year. This is one of the comforting things about farming: It’s the practice of returning chances—every spring is another opportunity to try again. This last year saw so many changes in my farming: the death of animals; pigs escaping and then needing to be moved to a friends farm, far from the encroaching suburbanites who don't understand a loose pig digging through their flower beds. But for all of the mistakes of last season this is a new one—a new chance to learn and grow and feed a few Arkansas people with Arkansas food.
I told my friend Joe that I had begun to plant and he said, "You can't plant now! Easter hasn't come yet." Joe's German Catholic ancestors always grew most of their own food, but they would never plant before Easter, even though they could have planted cool season crops like broccoli before then. The idea for these devout Catholic immigrants was that only after Easter was the resurrection of new life in the garden appropriate. Though I don't follow that tradition myself (new life is always ready to break forth when the conditions are right, in my view), I think there is something good and hopeful in that practice. It makes me wonder though, what will happen when spring is even earlier, and when planting time and Easter are far out of sync as the earth warms?
On a sunny day when the sky is clear and the wind is cool I don't want to think of such things. I want to simply enjoy this moment of a changing season. I want to pay attention to each and every change as it comes. I want to see the moment the oaks begin to leaf out. I want to notice the first day the warblers touch down from their long journeys. In this way I am seeing the earth as it is—a sacred thing ready for another season, ready to crack through the concrete, industrial life that runs according to fiscal years rather than natural years. I am ready and waiting to watch life come around again.
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