imple Vegetarian | What we did for Easter

Yesterday, pals up and down our street have been dressed in their Sunday first-rate, heading to and from church, attempting to find eggs, and gambling video video games. Meanwhile, Brian and I had been sporting our grungiest gardening garments, included in dirt and grass stains, hauling buckets of compost to and fro. Because while for plenty humans, Easter Sunday manner sweet and new dresses, for a gardener, it method it is almost time to start setting your first transplants out inside the garden?And that permits you to do this, you have got got to get the beds nicely prepared. So on the equal time as our gaily dressed buddies feasted and spent time, we spent the complete morning and a extraordinary bite of the afternoon toiling inside the fields.

By the time we in the long run went internal, around 3pm, we were every pretty tired and quite grungy, but we might finished quite masses:

• Brian hauled out the rain barrel from the shed and set it decrease again up on its pad. This process covered casting off and storing away the drainpipe extension that we used at some point of the iciness to divert water far from the house, and changing it with the shorter pipe that routes water from the gutter into the barrel. Once he had it lower again in its place, but, he located himself thinking whether or not or now not the empty barrel grow to be too moderate to resist blowing over in a excessive wind. He genuinely considered turning at the outside water to feature truely enough to the barrel to present it a few ballast, however it seemed a bit stupid to use circle of relatives water to top off the barrel whose entire cause is to store on our own family water use. Since there can be rain within the forecast for later this week, he figured the barrel ought to take its probabilities until then; it first-rate takes one exact rainfall to fill it pretty entire.

• We pulled all of the leaves and specific particles off the lawn beds (stashing it in buckets in view that there was no extra room inside the compost bin) and gave all of the beds an brilliant weeding. This consists of the everlasting beds where we hold the asparagus and rhubarb, and the mulched areas surrounding the cherry timber and the modern hardy kiwi vines. I'd been noticing ever due to the fact the snow melted that the boundary between the cherry timber and the surrounding garden were growing a piece blurry as weeds frequently encroached on the mulch area, so I took the opportunity to realign the border of clean stones that separates the 2. I ceded a piece of territory to the lawn, but the line of demarcation is now smooth again.

• While we were doing this, Brian located that a branch had damaged off one in every of our neighbor's wooden and have become now dangling through a shred of bark, at risk of coming down in our outside inside the subsequent immoderate wind. So, in preference to depart this sword of Damocles putting over our backyard, he fetched out the ladder and the handsaw and brought it down with some well-positioned strokes. Then, of direction, he had this whole massive dead branch he had to split, and at the equal time as he modified into doing that we figured we'd as well move beforehand and package deal all of the different woody material we had lying across the outdoor: sticks pulled out of the compost bin, leftover evergreen boughs from remaining yr's Christmas decorations, thousands of dried branches and leaves trimmed off our large sage plant, and, maximum risky of all, the prickly canes of remaining 12 months's raspberries that we reduce all the way down to make room for this 365 days's new growth. To wrap the ones up nicely, we practiced what Brian termed

• Next came the dirtiest part of the work, as Brian opened up the compost bin that had been heaped to overflowing all through the cold winter months. He dug out all the rich, black compost way down at the bottom and shoveled it into buckets, which I hauled down to the garden and spread on the beds. We eventually managed to extract about four buckets of compost per bed—enough to give each of them a thin coating, though definitely not the 1-inch layer that gardening experts recommend. We also added about one bucketful to the asparagus bed. In the process, Brian ended up removing pretty much the entire contents of the bin and then pitching it back in, with all the weeds and other debris we'd removed from the garden thrown in on top. So the bed has now had its annual turning, which is about all it gets from us, since we prefer the "cold compost" (aka "lazy") method. (By the way, those plants you can see still lingering in the beds are last year's Brussels sprouts. They hadn't produced any sprouts by the time winter came, and we never got around to hauling them out of the beds—but when the snow finally melted last month, we saw that they were still alive and starting to form tiny sprouts. So we figured we'd just leave the plants there until we actually need to plant something else in that space, and see whether the sprouts manage to get big enough to eat.)

• While Brian was setting the compost bin back to rights, I busied myself with the old trash barrel containing the last of the bulk batch of mulch we bought last fall. By tipping it onto its side and scooping out the contents with the shovel, I was able to extract enough to spread a nice inch or two on the asparagus bed. Then Brian helped me haul the barrel up to the front yard and renew the mulch "doughnuts" around our three plum trees. The little bit that was left got dumped onto a stray corner of the raspberry bed that was looking a bit bare.

Our grubbing in the dirt made an amusing contrast with our neighbors' finery and festivity, but it occurred to me as we worked that, really, what we were doing was entirely appropriate for the Easter season. After all, the holiday is all about two things: rebirth and redemption. What could be a better celebration of rebirth than waking up the garden after its long winter's sleep and preparing it to receive another season's plants? And what could be a better symbol of redemption than the transformation of kitchen and yard waste, dead and decaying vegetable matter, into rich, dark, lush compost that will nourish new growth?

Of course, I don't actually celebrate Easter myself; I'm in the middle of Passover right now. But personally, I think gardening is an appropriate way to celebrate that holiday too. It might seem like, if the whole point of the festival is to celebrate being freed from slavery in Egypt, it would be most appropriate to spend the eight days relaxing and not having to work at all—but work isn't slavery when you're doing it for your own benefit. Being able to work hard at a job you've chosen yourself, knowing that you will enjoy the fruits of your labors come the harvest—now that's a celebration of freedom.

So happy Easter and Passover, respectively, to all those who celebrate them. And to everyone else, happy spring!