Is it spring yet?

Is this an early spring, or just a tease? If it is just a tease, it sure is a good one, both indoors and out.

In the stores, onions, potatoes, dahlias, irises, peonies and gladiolas are all begging for someone to buy them and put them in the ground. At Fred Meyer, some roots of honeysuckle are so desperate to be planted they’ve busted through holes in their plastic packaging and pushed out new twigs with pale, needy green leaves. Someone should come rescue them soon, before they give up.

The seed racks are overflowing with little envelopes of every kind of flower and vegetable. Their packaging is worth reading. (I have a bias about this; once years ago I had a job writing text for some of them.)

On a packet of seeds for scarlet runner beans, a writer suggests making a teepee of tall stakes, planting the seeds at their bases, and growing an outdoor play space for kids. It would be like a tree house, but on the ground, so no falling out and breaking an arm. Had the author actually grown such a teepee? And harvested and eaten the beans?

I thought this was a new idea, but when I told a friend about it, he instantly whipped out his phone and googled it. YouTube has video of various versions of “green bean teepees for kids.” The rest of the internet has even more.  Apparently no one has a patent on it yet.

Standing around looking at the seed racks can be an inventory of what’s new — or new to us — and what old favorites endure. It can also be an inventory of our current stock of opinions and observations. I’m amazed these last few years by the proliferation of so many sizes, forms and colors of sunflowers. They may now be so diverse they offend anti-DEI zealots.

On the other hand, the many-decade staying power of plain old oak leaf lettuce is annoying for its steady, unimproved persistence. It’s claim to garden worthiness is that it can withstand heat, which most lettuce varieties can’t. But its narrow leaves are so thin they fall apart when you try to wash them, which is a pain in the patoot. 

As our summers get hotter, it might be best to plant the more kitchen-friendly lettuces in ever-shadier places.

Outdoors, the siren song of a coming spring is deafening this week. Maybe it will snow and freeze next week. Maybe we’ll have howling winds and power outages. But the forecast — always uncertain — predicts pretty calm progression toward spring for the next couple of weeks at least. 

Eager beavers will probably follow the vintage advice to plant peas on Presidents Day if their soil isn’t too cold, wet and muddy. For most of us, soil that’s too cold, wet and muddy leaves us free to tend to the many fruit trees, shrubs and rose bushes that need pruning now, while they are still mostly dormant. 

Pruning is a special set of skills. Different kinds of plants have different needs — more of them than most of us ordinary gardeners are likely to master or remember. Fortunately, most of us don’t need to, because we don’t have the full range of plant varieties.

Garden writers no longer need to try to explain how to prune which plants; we have YouTube videos for that too, and the very thorough Royal Horticulture Society website. 

We should just spend time this month watching plants wake up. Osoberries, also known as Indian plum (or Oemleria cerasiformis), are among them. They’re native shrubs common in the wild and in a growing number of gardens. Many are already showing green buds. Over the next few weeks, they’ll show the first green leaves in woodlands and at the edges of dense forests. By the end of this month, they’ll be showing pendant white blossoms. That sight will mean spring has definitely arrived. And a nightly chorus of courting frogs will join us in heralding its arrival.

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers, and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com.