Spring Things

Oh, happy Days - Spring is early this year at Lakeside Gardens - The snow has been gone for a couple of weeks although the dark woods still maintains a drift or two. The lake is still frozen but the edges are melting and a couple of good rains should hasten its departure. It's time to make Maple syrup - the earliest season we can remember for that - time to carry away the piles of leaves I had raked last Fall - time to clean out the root cellar and attend to our compost pit - time to plant seedlings and clean up the vegetation in the flower beds - in general, time to mingle with Mother Nature and enjoy the season of resurrection and resurgence...........We started composting the year we moved here, 1972, to be exact. For some strange reason, probably divine guidance, I subscribed to the "Organic Gardening" magazine that year - we were city raised through and through so it was pretty Greek to us - but we read and learned and composting seemed like such a good thing to do because one felt so much less guilty about wasting food stuffs when you knew that they would return to the earth and reinvegetate, (new word, like reincarnate.) We compost by putting all kitchen scraps and garden waste into three covered black five gallon buckets . When they are full, we take them to the compost pit behind our garden shed and empty them. A lot of the decomposing is done in the black buckets by the time we get them out there and then we cover the glop with dirt and let air and rain turn the glop to black gold. It's just another creative outlet and the compost is used to nourish the plantings later that year.........The accompanying pictures show the compost pit with the unused garden veggies and fruits gone bad in our root closet this year, then the pit with a covering of some of the raked leaves from last Fall....... our channel to the lake with the ice melting...... and the ice shanty already off the ice and ready to be used as storage for swimming toys......there is a time for everything under Heaven and I surely do like all these times.