Best Day of the Year

March 29th, 2016

One of my favorite days of every year is planting the early-spring vegetables.

One of my favorite days of every year is cool-season vegetable-planting day.

I usually try to get peas and onions in the ground sometime around St. Patrick’s Day (which I did this year), but the “big” day is typically the last Saturday of March.

That’s when I can finally get out there and plant the year’s first glorious, frost-tolerant edibles in the warming ground… the cabbage and broccoli seedlings started under basement workshop lights, some lettuce and radish seeds, a first round of beets and carrots, and a lot more.

By the time I’m done, nearly half of my garden is planted. In another week or so, I’ll add a few more cool-season crops (cauliflower, potatoes, kohlrabi, more lettuce, more beets, more carrots, etc.) until about three-quarters of the space is filled.

Vegetable-planting isn’t a May-only thing for me. In fact, if you wait until then to start planting like a lot of gardeners do, it’s really too late to get a decent crop of the cool-preferring stuff.

Broccoli that’s trying to mature in mid-July instead of late May, for example, goes right to seed instead of forming big florets.

May-planted radishes usually end up hot and woody in 80-degree days no matter how much water you give them.

And July-picked spinach usually is bitter instead of the tender, mild leaves of a late-April harvest.

For me, May is the time to “finish off” the vegetable garden with the warm-weather tomatoes, peppers, cukes and beans… not the time to get started.

Besides the practicality of it, late-March planting is the ideal antidote to months of soil deprivation.

I like the ground black and fluffy rather than white and crunchy. And I’ll take a warm spring breeze any day over those polar vortex blasts of January.

But something else I like about planting the March veggies is that it’s a time of hope, optimism and the never-ending belief that this will be my best gardening year ever.

After all, hardly any weeds are out this time of year. When you dig the soil, they don’t pop up the next day either.

Ditto for bugs and diseases. It’s too early for most of those.

Groundhogs usually don’t mess with the cabbage yet. This kind of damage is out of sight and out of mind now.

A good soaking with the hose buys you several days of coverage in this cool spring weather. No need to worry about going away for 2 days and returning to a wilted garden as can happen in July or August.

And even the groundhogs are nowhere in sight. Yet.

What can stop me? All systems are go at this stage of the game. Even a few more freezes won’t matter because I know the cabbages, onions, broccoli, radishes, etc. can all weather them just fine.

But something else has been creeping into my rapidly aging mind the last few years that makes this time of year even better than ever.

I find myself thinking, “I’m grateful just to be here to plant another garden in another year.”

Even though it hurts more to bend over (and even more to get back up), I’m thankful that I still have the health to walk out the door and dig in that friendly, familiar soil.

So if I beat the groundhogs to the cabbage this year, it’ll be merely a bonus in the bigger picture of things.