I’m more of an Autumn person - I love the Fall colours and the smell of harvested fields all around me.
But I can’t deny the appeal of Spring. Summer continues on where Spring leaves off, and Autumn just happens. Winter is better forgotten. But Spring has no qualms about stepping on your toes and being in your face.
First the wind changes and one day, unexpectedly, you catch that first whiff that comes from faraway, out of sight and out of mind, that wakes up the senses and tells you that Spring is coming. Within days the birds suddenly change their tune to a happy chatter that is easily identified. Then it’s just a matter of a few more days before we hear the geese honking overhead like the busload of noisy travellers they are.
Furnace in the morning, air conditional by mid-afternoon. Wind, rain, the occasional snow... You can’t ignore Spring. This unpredictable weather is meant to slap us in the face and wake us up after our Winter slumber.
Well, maybe not us, but the trees, the critters and even the seedlings buried beneath the Earth’s surface all get that wakeup call.
And every Spring, we make ourselves a promise - to paint the fence or keep the dandelios out of the flowerbed, or fix the deck railing.
Almost every year for the past 10, I’ve promised myself that this would be the year I got the vegetable garden dug. Well, it finally happened. It isn’t planted yet (well, d’uh), but it’s finally dug. I haven’t quite finished reconstructing the front yard that I ripped up in 2008, but it’s time the vegetable garden went in. That little voice in my head told me so.
It’s been a long time since we’ve had a garden. The beautiful, hot weather and long growing season was one of the things that appealed to me about living here, but it’s taken 10 years to get around to it.
With vegetable gardens come my own choice of food, a bigger selection of weeds and some really ugly bugs, but there are worse things in life. The best thing is that I can finally cross that promise off my list.
Wendy Coomber is editor of The Ashcroft-Cache Creek Journal