All you folks from the old country will be murmuring, “Oh, to be in England now that April’s here.”
Never having been there in April, I can only imagine fields of daffodils blooming all along country roads, robins singing happily as they look for suitable nesting sites, new greenery in the hedges and trees and the fragrance of newly turned sod as farmers prepare to plant this year’s crops.
Of course farmers here are doing the same thing, but it sounds more romantic if its somewhere far away. Here, you probably are only vaguely aware of a man on a tractor plowing a distant field, also readying the soil for seeding.
There is something buried deep, warm and wonderful in most of us that goes back centuries to our primitive forebears as they scratched the soil with a bent stick before planting precious seed saved from last year’s harvest.
I really should have been a farmer. I love the soil, even the earth in my big pots warms my heart as I lovingly handle it. To me it is alive, warm, brimming with nutrition, just waiting to do what it was designed to do.
Time to go to a garden centre and buy those seeds, before I go mad waiting for the right time to plant them. Actually almost everything can be planted now, with the possible exception of corn. It needs a warm soil to germinate, but anytime now seems a possibility.
Helen Lang has been the Peninsula News Review’s garden columnist for more than 30 years.
