It’s supposed to be winter, right? The garden’s supposed to be dead, or to put it more gently, at least in deep repose. But over the past few days I’ve found myself studying a patch of Rye I planted late in the season. Too late, I thought at the time. But I had some extra seed, and I hate seeing bare ground, so I figured I’d give it a try. To my surprise, it not only sprouted right before that last snow storm, whose snow is still lingering in spots; but it is even growing now a little each day. The picture above shows that it’s about an inch tall, where four weeks ago it was barely poking through the soil.

It brings to mind a passage from Verlyn Klinkenborg’s book “The Rural Life,” in which he’s talking about the notion of seasons, and how nature doesn’t always conform literally to our timeline:

I had always though of [winter] as a slow patch of death, of stasis at least, in the plant world. That’s the sort of thing you believe when you take the idea of season too literally… [But] there, at the end of autumn, stood the whole shape of spring, held back only by the still-dwindling daylight, by a keen, continuous apprehension of time.

I guess this little patch of the garden has not only taken shape, but has started moving into spring with the lengthening days. It’s fun to watch!

While there’s mostly a lot of paper farming going on at this time of year, every now and then we get to do some outside work.  This afternoon I was able to turn some of the compost we’ve been making at our house.  To my surprise, I discovered a pretty healthy-looking colony of worms.  In the picture above, see how many there were in one shovelful of compost!  Yay!  Okay, that may be a bit of a geeky thing to celebrate, but it means the compost pile is healthy and working, and that’s exciting.

Pretty much all of the worms were bunched in the middle of the pile, where I suspect it was warm enough for them to wait out the winter. Much of the pile is a frozen block of ice, but where the worms were was very nice, loose compost.

A close-up of the worms shows that they are mature and probably reproducing.  That thick band in the middle of the foreground worm in the picture below means it’s able to reproduce.  I’m not sure where they came from.  Maybe someone inoculated the pile with worms. Neighbors…?

In any case, we’re looking forward to being able to spread a good quantity of compost this spring.

Cheers,

-Mike