Rewind
A Visual Essay
Another day of a biting wind, temperatures hovering just above freezing, and an angry grey sky. But earlier this week we had a taste of warmth and the smell of damp soil intoxicated me. This month’s visual essay is for all of you who carry a March heart longing for spring.
During the spring shoulder season, when I crave color but have none of my own flowers to harvest, I always purchase ranunculus from a local store. They’re a sure sign that warm weather will arrive soon. I love how gnarled their stems look, how the buds pucker and pout. And somehow, the whole bouquet still swims with tenderness.
Over the years, I’ve learned to adjust when I start growing plants indoors. If I start too soon (in January), the plants become leggy and often fail to thrive in late March, when they really need natural light and warmer temperatures. If I wait until late March to start, then seedlings don’t reach an optimal stage of growth before our last frost. The whole point of starting plants indoors is to get a jump start on flower blossoms and to harvest food from the kitchen garden early in the growing season. I’m very close to transitioning beets (pictured above), parsley, snapdragons, and lettuce into the polytunnel so they can acclimate to light and outdoor temperatures.
Two years ago I planted nearly sixty daffodil bulbs across my outdoor garden beds. I transitioned away from tulips because deer and rabbits ravaged them before they could even bloom. But daffodils are of no interest to my local wildlife. It’s too early for my daffodils to blossom — I’ve got another 6-8 weeks — so a store-bought bouquet will have to do.
White ranunculus embody characteristics of my other favorite flowers: a rose, a poppy, a peony.
I have my favorite places to source seeds, but I also swap with my mom. We sit down like two little girls about to play with their dolls — we compare what we have, we admire what the other has, and then we share seeds back and forth. Mom’s seeds that I’m growing this year: moon flower, gomphrena, amaranth, and cinnamon basil.
Life under the lights. It’s a pretty simple set up: metal shelves, grow lights suspended beneath each shelf, heat mats, and plastic seed trays. Once the seedlings sprout additional leaves, I remove the heat mat, but keep them under the grow lights, which hang about 1-2 inches above them. I use seed starting soil for initial germination and then regular potting soil combined with vermiculite for seedlings. Pictured here: lettuce, snapdragons, parsley, and a flower I can’t identify but which I collected last year with a note that said, “Plant me!”
Those petal layers, like an apple tart, but make it tangerine.
Somehow we’ll get through what feels like the hardest time of the year for a gardener; we’re at the starting line waiting for the race to begin. We can cheer each other on by sharing gardening stories. I’ve told a few... here are some of my favorites:
I’d love to hear from you. Up next: a new poem.
-Betsy
Beautiful photography! I appreciate it. And I bought some Johnny seeds this year for the first time.