in the garden

I stepped outside yesterday afternoon with a coat on and in five minutes I took it off and walked over to the garden; it felt like a typical, sunny spring day and that immediately improved my mood.  

We haven't had a lot of rain around here, but the gentle rain seems to come about every third day:  just enough to keep the garden dirt too wet to use a tiller and get anything planted.   However, there were a lot of trashy dead plants, so I walked around picking those up and tossing them out of the garden.  Gabe the dog and Blue the cat were delighted to have me back in the garden with them and played tag with one another for awhile; I pulled out the metal lawn chair I used so much last year and thought about things awhile.  That garden looks awfully big, and I'm wondering if I'll be able to keep up if I plant the whole thing as I did last year.  I haven't even bought the seeds I need yet!

If and when I get seeds, I think I'll just start out as though I'm going to plant the whole garden; then we'll see what I feel like it when the workload of planting and watering and picking and tilling starts to get the best of me.  If it's too much, I will keep the tomatoes and peppers and whatever else I can manage.  

Cliff came outside later, saw dead leaves and dead weeds and grasses settled at the bottom of the garden fence, and suggested he put a match to it.  There was a brisk wind, but the ground is damp, and I told him to go ahead if he wanted to; he is such a firebug.  In spite of the damp ground, the fire traveled a little further north than we'd have liked, so he got out the hose and put an end to it. The fire went through my strawberry patch, but I'm pretty sure those plants that got burned will come back up; there are lots of green strawberry leaves amidst the ashes.  The smoke had settled into our clothes and hair, so when we came in we had to take showers.  

Today it will rain, but that 60° day yesterday gave me hope for the future.  Spring has come and will turn to summer, and I'm blessed enough to see that happen one more time... I hope.