The Daily: 10 March 2024

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The last moon of winter, the Snow Moon, went dark today at 5am. In acknowledgment of the spring sun’s rising earlier and earlier — 6:12am in my town yesterday — those who follow Daylight Savings Time have had an hour removed from their morning today at 2am. This morning’s sunrise is 7:10am, meaning we’ve lost an hour of morning light so that we can have more day in the evening hours. Sunset today is at 6:50pm. Since we don’t shift our work schedules to work later in the day, I’m not sure how this is a savings of daylight. It seems more like a loss of sleep. It’s harder to fall asleep when it’s still light out, so we’re awake later. But we still have to get up at 5am — or whatever unholy time is necessary to accommodate wage work — now once again in the darkness of winter. Which means it’s harder to wake up also. No body particularly likes this odd shifting of clock time. But then most bodies don’t much like clock time either. I hope I live long enough to see clock time eliminated with the rest of modernity’s management of our lives. But I’d settle for ending Daylight Savings Time.

Still, the clock shift and the end of Snow Moon are both undeniable signs of spring. I’m holding on to that as the winds howl and the snow swirls around my house, piling up in drifts on the garden beds. Earlier in the week, the weather prognosticators were saying that this storm would bring rain to the beginning of the week, with maybe a bit of snow early Monday morning and precipitation of all kinds tapering off on Monday afternoon. Just to prove the silly humans wrong, the weather gods decided to start dumping sleet and freezing rain before sunset on Saturday. The weather folks are now saying it might end sometime on Tuesday. This is not feeling much like spring.

Or at least it is not bunnies-and-flowers spring. It is not our ideas of spring. This time is not notably pink and fuzzy. It is not a time of lambs gamboling in green meadows dotted with wildflowers and butterflies. There are no nodding daffodils and leaves dancing in the gentle spring zephyrs. The view out my window is not particularly vernal. Nevertheless, it is Spring. The Sap Moon is a new crescent tomorrow, and the equinox happens in a week. By sun and moon, it is squarely the middle of Spring, which is an entirely different time than what is sold to us in wall calendars and gift shops and Etsy.

This time is not cute infants and t-shirt weather. It is mud-caked shoes and hours of mopping. It is bare branches and brown garden beds, often flocked with ice. It is the frozen lid on the composter and the frozen pipe-drain in the garage. Sap may need warm sunshine every day to stir the trees from their solstice somnolence, but sap also needs winter temperatures every night to set up the hydraulics of pumping fluid from root to twig and back again. A good syrup season needs cold nights all through March, not least to endure the heat of the evaporators. No, the Sap Moon is not fluffy. It is jagged and cold interleaved with fog and mud deep enough to swallow a forklift. (True story in Vermont… or maybe apocryphal, but told frequently enough to make it truthy…)

Still… the Old Farmer’s Almanac claims that hummingbirds are migrating north now, though they won’t be in New England until May brings nectar-filled blossoms. I have heard an owl singing love songs in the cold hours before sunrise, and the small birds are gorging themselves at the feeder. The chickadees are demanding a restock every couple days, and the finches stare dolefully at the back door when the feeders get low. The wren family is back, but this year they’ve decided to set up housekeeping in the bleached bovine skull that I have hanging on the front porch, sheltered from the wind and out of reach of flightless predators. They both are still flitting about, so they haven’t got down to business yet. Just establishing property rights, I guess. However, the brown female cardinals have disappeared, so they must be nesting already. I hope they know what they’re about. It could be months before we see much in the way of insects or seeds. There is little enough even of green in the garden: a few bulbs, the strawberries, and a bunch of volunteer — or forgotten — onions in the garden, all very welcome to me, but useless to hungry nestlings and their starving mothers.

I haven’t seen the groundhog yet, but the skunks and squirrels are definitely stirring in my neighborhood. There are snowdrops blooming under the cedars this week, barely plural because the squirrels dug up dozens of these toxic bulbs. I planted a bulk bag of fifty out there precisely because squirrels can’t eat them (and also… snowdrops…) But didn’t they prove the bulb seller wrong! Those damned rodents exhumed about forty-five of them, leaving most lying on the surface without even biting into them. They also dug up a potful of hyacinths and daffodils that I’d planted by the back door, to have a small wash of early spring color when the rest of the garden was still languishing under the snow. Stupid tree rats ripped all the bulbs out of the potting soil. This wasn’t for food. You can not convince me that a squirrel can’t smell the poison in these highly toxic bulbs. Yet even were that true, one bitter bite is more than most palates can tolerate. And one bite is the most that is taken from these bulbs. Like the snowdrops, they dug up the bulbs and left them scattered about the porch steps.

Maybe the bulbs will be fine. I shoved them back in the soil as soon as I got home and discovered them, and it’s been too cool and damp to dehydrate them. But it was warm last week, warm enough that snowdrops bloomed. Warm enough to trigger sprouting in the shallowly buried potted bulbs. There is evidence that the bulbs had sent up green nubs. Ripping them out of the pot broke off the shoots. These bulbs are fat and vigorous, but I wonder if they have the energy stores to create another sprout before they can do any photosynthesizing to replenish what was lost in the first round. I guess I’ll find out later.

Hearing the owl calling for a mate made my gardener’s heart soar! Please, do, come live in my trees — and eat rodent until your belly is bursting! A few healthy predators and their hungry families would go a long way toward keeping the squirrel population below plague levels.

The skunks are another issue. Nobody eats skunk. Skunks have the run of the town. And they are. Vermont smells like angry skunk right now. Every few dozen yards of highway, there is another dead ball of black fur and stink. Two weeks ago, an irate animal went on a graffiti spree, spraying foul funk around the entire downtown area around where I work. It stunk for days. Then a few nights ago, I woke at 2am to a smell so strong it made my eyes water — inside my thoroughly sealed house! No roadkill body in the morning, so I guess there was a odoriferous dog somewhere in the neighborhood. I can only imagine the torture of that stench in sensitive canine snouts.

But that is the extent of spring. No bunnies. No warm breezes. Absent female cardinals notwithstanding, not much evidence of eggs. Very little green. Maybe five tiny white flowers in my garden. The buds on the pear trees are starting to open, but the apple buds are still fuzzy and of course the maples are still securely sealed. They won’t open until later, and when that happens, the sap turns bitter. So we don’t want to see the maples flowering in the Sap Moon. Or we don’t get syrup.

This storm notwithstanding, it was warm enough recently to melt most of the snow — and the top several inches of soil. Hence all the mud. The lower levels are still frozen, so there is no drainage for all this meltwater and it just pools on the surface. My driveway is a swamp, and I am fantasizing about French drains and pouring in gravel several feet deep. I am tired of cleaning the kitchen floor after I track mud into the house. I’m also tired of washing my clothes.

The Sap Moon is laundry season in Vermont. There is an urge to dig out the lighter clothing — to be ready in case the temperature climbs above freezing — and there is a need to air out the household fabrics that have been moldering all through the winter confinement. But mostly it’s down to all this mud. I don’t wash clothing unless it is dirty. This saves money on my water and electric bills. But it’s also better for the fabric — and the planet. Frequent washing breaks down the fibers. It wears out your clothing quickly, in the process sending petrochemicals that make up the dyes and synthetic threads down the drain and ultimately into plant and animal tissues. Not a goal. So I don’t wash until I can see or smell the need. This usually means I can put things back in the closet in the evening — but not in the Sap Moon. However much care is taken, you will acquire a spattering of mud on your hemline as soon as you set foot outside. Brushing against the car or the garden gate will smear your clothes with grey grit. Walking to the store is misery. Thinly frozen pothole landmines filled with slush and road run-off, cars splashing icy grime, gunk dripping from buildings — it’s impossible to make a trip without generating a whole load of laundry.

In normal months, I wash maybe two loads a week. In the Sap Moon, it’s double that or more. This is hard on the water budget, but it’s murder on the electricity bill. It’s very hard to dry things outdoors in this damp climate, and it’s almost as difficult to hang things dry in the basement. So I use my dryer more than I’d like. (This is what really breaks down fabric fibers… hence dryer lint…) The extra laundry is underscoring my need for a wood stove. I need a point source for heat, and I need a dry basement. Then these racks and lines I have strung up down there will allow my clothes to dry before they mildew. Or dry at all in some cases. I have to bring sweaters upstairs to the kitchen — which is awkward in that very small space — because bulky fabrics do not dry in the basement. A sweater has to be obviously soiled before I take on that project.

For all that it is still winter outdoors and the garden is mostly frozen, it is time to start planting seeds. Next week is the equinox; it’s the middle of spring, the half-way point between the solstices. The days are rapidly lengthening and the soil is coming alive under the warm caress of the sun. For plants like tomatoes and peppers, it is time to sow seeds in paper pots indoors so that these long season plants have time to fruit before frost reclaims the garden in the autumn. I will be planting the nightshades in the basement in the coming weeks, expecting to transplant the healthy starts into the garden by the end of May. It is also traditional in New England to plant peas — and other cold-hardy veggies — on St Paddy’s Day. So I’ll do that if the weather is at all cooperative. I have row cover on the pea trellis to give them a bit more protection from cold, and the raised beds warm quickly. So all I need is a few days of sunshine to melt the snow and the top of the soil, and there will be peas in April.

Of course, none of that is ordained. Garden plans never are, and the more ambitious the more likely they won’t happen. I am not upset by this. In fact, I enjoy the planning part. So the prospect of failure just means I get to make more plans. It’s a good idea to have multiple pathways to food and be ready to use any of them when things go sideways. As they will. For example, last week my garden planner read “plant out cabbage starts”. I was supposed to have those ready to plant out, but I did not. For one thing, I keep getting sick (people will come in with active infections and spread them around the bank). But there was a bigger problem. It was a good thing I did not start the cabbage indoors in early February so that I could plant out the starts in March in the original bed organization — because I’m not going to plant the cabbage in those beds now. Since making the original plan, I’ve discovered that I need to move the brassicas away from the road — to beds that don’t exist yet. If I’d stuck to the original plan, I’d be super-stuck now. Lots of little homeless cabbages. They’d be dead before I could get the new beds built and filled with soil. However, there are still weeks left of the cool temperatures cabbages love. So I think I can start the seeds outside and have time for the plants to mature before heat makes them all bolt to seed.

If I was adamant about my planning, I wouldn’t be quite so good at these pivots. I would get stuck in what should happen and then feel like a failure when it didn’t. It would not be a pleasant experience. Nor would it be the most efficient way to make food. I would waste a lot of time and seeds and soil sticking to unproductive plans. I would probably end up buying far more of everything and settling for plants that I could find at the garden center — in May, after my plan failed. Undoubtedly, whatever would be left at that point would not be the variety of food that I wanted to eat. So I say, make plans — and be ready with more plans and actions when the first plans fall apart.

I can follow the plan for the peas. I just need to organize the seeds and shove them into the soil. So that plan worked. But then there are the wholly unforeseen volunteer onions in the veg garden. I never waste volunteer food, but now I have to figure out what they are and what to do with them, heading into the warm season. They look like they could be ready for harvest in June — exactly when it will be too warm for root storage in the basement. So I have to give that some logistical consideration. More plans! I also need to seed another round of greens in the cold frame, maybe with some radishes this time. That plan didn’t work out at all, but I didn’t really expect it to. It was just a little seed sown with little hope. I planted that first round in a warm spell right before the temperatures dropped to around 0°F. The cold frame keeps tender plants from freezing if there is sun — which was not really the case in February, though we had more days of sun in those 29 days than we did in the preceding 60. But the cold frame can not warm soil to germination temperatures which are forty to fifty degrees above 0°F. So no cold frame greens sprouted. And then we had more snow and the greens were forgotten… But now that we are in the middle of spring, I think I can expect broadly spring-like temperatures. So there will be greens after this planting. I can plan on that. I think.

And by the time the greens are ready to harvest there may be green everywhere else. The sap will be bitter as the leaves erupt from the trees. The Sap Moon will go dark. But the days will be long and bright. Early summer. The time of eggs and bunnies and buds. Maybe there will even be daffodils. I am putting my hopes in that owl — and the resilience of the garden. Despite all my plans, it always surprises me with abundance.

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A short explanatory note…

Last fall (or early winter?), I thought I might like to do a Church of Beethoven on this website on Sundays. I have not done that. First, it takes more time than I can spend. But the bigger problem is getting permission to put the words of others on this website. Unless something is public domain, there is no guarantee that you will be allowed to quote things at length — except in the context of reviewing or citing. More problematically, many owners of works (not always the same as the creators…) want to be paid. (The creators are often more willing to freely share with proper credit than those who buy rights to works…) And trying to demonstrate good faith and wrestle permissions out of that takes so bloody long! I have all but given up. If some of my requests finally produce fruit, maybe I’ll post them someday. But I can’t plan on it, and these few posts will likely be well out of season before I hear back.

I don’t remember what the real Church of Beethoven did about such things. Despite the name, we didn’t restrict ourselves to public domain works. Nor do I remember paying fees for anything. I suspect, if we thought about it at all, that we followed the pragmatic policy of “it’s better to beg forgiveness than ask permission”.

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©Elizabeth Anker 2024