The Hardest Time of the Year

March is such a cruel month in Duke City.  It's still technically winter and yet the weather has turned beautiful.  It's sunny and breezy and warm enough to be outside in a t-shirt.  The trees are flowering and sending out new growth.  Every inch of my body screams to get outdoors and start planting.  And yet I have to wait to plant most of my favourite vegetables.  I know that, come Easter, there will be one last hard freeze that will wipe out any tender greens.

Still, I can't help but get something in the ground.  This year, that means two different plantings.  There are two pots on the patio that now have sugar snap peas planted in them.  And one flower bed that I raked black spanish round radish seeds and a rainbow blend of carrot seeds into, with the promise that they will be finished and gone before my mother-in-law wants to plant flowers there.

And they're starting to come up!  Oh, the optimism of spring. Peas are beginning to push through the potting soil and a full dozen radishes are sunning their cotyledon.  Maybe, if I'm lucky, there will be as much radish growth underground as above and the carrots will follow suit, unlike last year.  I have no real logical reason to suspect that it will be so.  Quite the opposite, in fact, but I can't help it when the weather turns this nice.  I have to believe in spring!