The Minnesota Farm Woman

You are probably wondering why I always write about gardening in the winter, when everything, including my feet, are a solid block of ice. Truthfully, it is to keep myself from going stark-raving mad when I am surrounded by this never-ending season of Frozen, which in real life is NOT a cute little Disney movie. There is nothing cute about a temperature of six below zero, which is supposed to be the high today. I don’t even want to tell you the low. Days like this take me to my own personal happy place, a Disney Fantasyland of sorts. When we moved back to Minnesota from Florida a few years ago, I carried my vegetable seeds and seed potatoes in the car with us, and thanks to the help of an old friend who tilled a medium-sized garden spot before we even got here, I started planting before the moving boxes were unpacked. The next year, HE asked me how big of a garden I wanted, and I paced out the area for him to till. It was big. Bigger than big. He also erected a lovely high fence around it to keep the deer out. For the first time in my life, I had a garden as big as I wanted, and then some. Truthfully, it is way too big, and the weeds get away from me every year. The next spring, he tilled and fenced a garden in the back field. “I want to plant a few strawberries and pumpkins”, he said, and made a garden nearly the size of a football field. I tend to exaggerate, but should have been suspicious at the time, because nobody hates gardening more than HE does. In fact, I think there is something in our marriage vows “in sickness or in health but not in the garden”, or something like that. What he really wanted was to purchase the strawberry and pumpkin plants, then eat lots of strawberry shortcake and pumpkin pie. The stuff that came in between needed to be done by either waving a magic wand or waiting for me to do it. It is my own fault because after all, I do kind of promote myself as a Farm Woman. A sow it, plant it, hoe it, weed it, harvest it, cook it, and preserve it kind of Farm Woman. A tired and “What do you mean those weeds grew back? I just pulled them last week!” kind of Farm Woman. When I dreamed of this northern beauty of a garden, I was knee-deep in my Florida plot in 90 degree heat, trying to conjure black loam out of white sand, dodging snakes, (I don’t care if it was a “good” snake, any snake that is two feet long and meets me while I am on my hands and knees, nearly causing me to have a heart attack cannot possibly be “good”!) and slapping vicious mosquitoes. Here, the season is shorter and cooler. I am knee-deep in good black dirt, dodging snakes (they are a little smaller, but can still potentially cause a heart attack), and slapping mosquitoes which are even more vicious. Things don’t change much, do they? Except that it is probably going to be 75 degrees at my former home today. That’s ABOVE zero. I think I’ll just grab my seed catalogs and a hot cup of coffee and crawl under the electric blanket to dream of summer gardens to come. Weedless, snakeless, mosquitoless gardens. My Fantasyland. It is truly a happy place.