I'm questioning whether or now not I need to reconsider thesegardeners' holidays that I've been looking to celebrate at some stage in this twelve months. The problem is that it looks like the most significant dates in a gardeners' calendar do not necessarily coincide with the solstices and equinoxes and elements in between; they arrive every time they arrive. The yr started off fairly nicely, due to the reality the number one seedlings I commenced out (the parsley) went in on January 29, which come to be close sufficient to February 2 for me to dub that the Festival of Seeds. But the first seeds to get planted at once in the floor (the snow peas) went in on March 31, a complete eleven days after the spring equinox. And our first harvest of the year got here tons less than weeks after that. Admittedly, it wasn't an awful lot of a harvest?Handiest two spears of asparagus, which we placed into an omelet with some mushrooms?But though, the first meal of the season to be made with home-grown food is a pretty momentous event in a gardeners' calendar, and it got here smack-dab in among the spring equinox and May Day.
So there are a couple of different ways I ought to circulate at this issue. One is to scrap the whole belief of tying the gardeners' holidays to the
The other approach is to keep the schedule of holidays—February 2, March 20, May 1, and on from there—but drop the idea of tying them to specific events in the gardening calendar. After all, when you're keeping a garden, there's always something going on at any given time of year, so instead of trying to stretch and declare March 20 to be Winter Sowing Day, I could just say something like, "As of today, March 20, I have parsley, celery, and leek seedlings; the Sun Gold tomatoes I started last weekend aren't up yet, and the rest of the tomatoes don't go in until this weekend." But the problem with that is that then my "holiday" wouldn't be much of an occasion. Sure, there's stuff going on, but nothing really momentous.
I think the best compromise between the two may be to fudge a bit. I could either tweak the dates to bring them closer to events of significance in the gardening calendar, or tweak the timing of the events to bring them closer to the preselected dates. For instance, I probably could have gotten away with planting my peas on March 20 instead of March 31; my schedule said to do it seven weeks before the last frost date (which I estimated at May 12), but the seed packet actually says "as soon as ground can be worked," and I'm sure the ground was workable that early.
So my tentative plan for the rest of the holidays on the wheel of the year is to tie them to whatever significant event on the gardening calendar falls closest to them—whether it exactly coincides or not. For example, I could declare May 1 to be the Festival of Asparagus—though not the Dawning of the Age of Asparagus, since as I've mentioned, we've harvested our first few spears already. But according to this local produce chart, the asparagus season should be reaching its peak right about then, and the rhubarb season will probably be just starting around the same time. So either of those might work. I guess we'll just wait and see what comes up when under real-world conditions.
