January Showers Bring May Spinach

The man who’d come to repair our heat pump (again) stood on the porch dripping like Michael Phelps.  Necessary to the functioning of the heat pump (which isn’t functioning) is its location outside.  Terribly inconvenient for someone trying to put it back in the game at 4:00 PM on a Tuesday in January.  I must say the repairman, as he shook first one limb and then another to reduce his saturation load, was pretty pleasant.  But then he stands to gain $100.00 per hour fixing our heat pump in the rain, and his message to me tonight is after this second visit in as many weeks he now knows what part is needed, and he’ll be back once it’s been shipped. 

The dark, damp days of January are bad enough even without heat.  But somehow a simple remark Mom made the other day has me focusing on the future, in spite of the fact that today my ears are dripping because I’m wicking water up through my toes.  Mom said, “I got a Territorial Seed Company catalog in the mail,”  and suddenly the two of us were thrust into our  futures of trellises of green beans, patches of pumpkins and buckets of freshly dug potatoes.  Gardening always begins as a vision, and the capacity of the Northwest to sprout just about anything–check under your bed–is what allows me to forgive it these dismal winter days.

Under the spell of the Territorial Seed Company catalog, Mom and I ping ponged ideas for our gardens.  Tom and I will grow assorted pots and barrels at our place but we’ll also collaborate with Mom over at hers to grow vegetables that require room to stretch and grow.  Feathery spinach and little gem lettuces line up nicely in planter boxes just a skip or two from our back door, but those peregrinating squashes would be squashed in our tiny garden space.  They’ll enjoy rambling at Mom’s.  If we’re feeling charitable, we’ll plant corn.  Given Mom’s previous experience, we may have to share it with the raccoons.  We’ll also set up several tee pees of climbing green beans at Mom’s, even though Tom and I had great success with green beans at our house last summer.  To our fascination, two varieties planted separately weren’t content to keep their pollen to themselves and produced a third, hybrid variety.  Gardens are sexy places. 

For Mom and me, talking gardens-to-be is theraputic when the weather outdoors seems to defy any hope of sun and bloom.  The thought of sprouts and buds and eventually fruit animates us, draws us out of the semi-hybernation state we seem to slip into with lack of light and day after day of gray.  Now that Christmas lists are crumpled and tossed, we have pulled out a fresh sheet of paper.  Our new list reads:  butter lettuce, dwarf romaine, red oak leaf, two kinds of spinach, green onions, snap peas…