Donnie Johnston: Spring is Taking its Time This Year
But potatoes and onions are now in the ground.
By Donnie Johnston
COLUMNIST
Finally, a little green is starting to appear on the landscape.
This is one of the latest springs I can recall. Here we are almost two weeks into March and the ground is still brown with dormant grass. Here and there a few sprigs of vegetation are popping up, but the grass—even the wild onions—is hesitant to come out and face the cold.
A little redness is starting to appear on the maple trees, but the forsythia, which sometimes blooms in mid-February, is hardly budding, at least in my neighborhood.
Yes, it has been nice the past couple of days, but warm weather has been a long time coming. In fact, before this week, the last 70-degree high temperature I recorded was on Nov. 11,
That’s right, more than four months ago.
That is almost unprecedented in this part of Virginia. Usually, around January 20 or at intervals in February—sometimes even during Christmas week, we have a warm spell. Not this winter.
Of course, late springs have always occasionally occurred, although we haven’t had one in the past decade or so. No, it is not a sign of global warming or global cooling, just the way nature works.
It was a cold winter—for these parts, especially during January and February. There was enough snow on the ground (albeit sometimes in a pile in a parking lot) to make a snowball from Jan. 6 until the last day of February.
You don’t see that too often in Central Virginia. We didn’t get a tremendous amount of snow—maybe 15 inches, but the cold weather caused it to hang around.
We had two really cold snaps and one night the temperature at my house dropped to zero. That, too, is pretty chilly for Central Virginia, but hardly unprecedented. In 1899 we dropped to eight below (in February) and there have been a number of years since then, when we fell into in minus territory.
All that said, my spring arrived on March 1. The ground I plowed in October worked up well that afternoon and by nightfall I had four rows of potatoes and a row of onions planted.
I would have planted peas and beets too, but my local seed supplier went out of business and I had a difficult time locating another. Finally, I had to order seeds from an outfit called True Leaf Market in Salt Lake City.
This firm had the varieties I wanted so I called in my order and the seeds were at my door in three working days. And the prices were excellent. I highly recommend this outfit.
I planted peas and beets Sunday after church and that will be it until the last week in April when the warm weather crops go in. Oh, I will start some yellow squash seeds (in my basement) the first week in April.
Yes, garden season is here again and I’m already trying to ambush one groundhog in the fencerow near the upper garden and another down under the barn. And I will undoubtedly battle deer again this summer. Gardening is no simple matter.
So far, it has been a pretty typical March, windy and chilly with a few warm days now starting to appear. But don’t be fooled. It is not time to put the blue jeans and jackets away just yet. I have seen it snow a number of times in late March and in 1983 we had three inches on Apr. 15.
When will it get warm enough to start wearing shorts every day? Try May 20, although about two decades ago it got down to 28 degrees on May 22 and froze half my tomatoes.
As I have written before, summer eases its way into winter, but winter refuses to yield to summer and battles to the very end.
We are not done with cold weather yet.
My, how times have changed. I was flipping through my TV channels the other day when I heard Drew Carey, the host of “The Price is Right,” excitedly exclaim to a contestant, “You’re going to Vietnam!”
The man was overjoyed, smiling and jumping up and down as contestants on that show do.
How many young men of my generation were horrified and frightened out of their wits when they heard “You’re going to Vietnam.”?
Many of my friends went. Five came home in body bags.
Now Vietnam is our buddy, and we send prize winners over there on vacations. Hopefully, they won’t stay at the Hanoi Hilton.
Those were bad times.
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