A spring gardening surprise: green leaves instead of green shoots
So much is terrible in the world right now, but at least I’m not looking at lettuce as a grocery line-item expense on the first day of spring. That’s not because I’ve renounced leafy greens as a sandwich fixing, but because the spinach and some of the arugula that I grew from seed in the fall somehow survived winter.
Alongside them in the raised bed outside the back patio, parsley and, even less likely, cilantro have staged their own late-winter resurrections.
I can’t imagine why even the most fault-tolerant of these plants should have done that. This winter, unlike many in recent years, not only had extended hard freezes but multiple snow days that left that bed buried in snow for days at a stretch. Even building a cold frame should have been inadequate.
Having done nothing to prolong those crops, I should have had to start from scratch about two weeks before today, scattering dirt and seeds and looking forward to seeing the first green shoots emerge from the soil later this month.
(To anybody reading this intimidated by the idea of starting a vegetable garden: It’s hard to screw up arugula in the spring, and it’s also hard to find a recipe that can’t be improved with a little of it.)
Instead, after 20 years of having this questionably-productive hobby, I now need to decide if want to dig up some of these survivors to try growing some lettuce to mix things up. And if this means that my long losing streak of trying to cultivate tomatoes might be due for a change in a couple of months. This unearned gardening luck is not much in the larger scheme of things, but I’ll take it.
