Even though my brain knows that the temperatures have hovered mostly around freezing of late, I still found myself surprised when I tried to stick a plastic plant label that had come up back into the ground near the plant it belonged to, and failed.
Granted, the marker is thin flat plastic, but the ground would not yield to the tapered soft point end. I took a nearby stick that had fallen from the trees behind where I crouched and tried to use that to make a starting point where I might then work the flat marker deeper. The stick buckled between my fingers and broke.
With the past holly days weeks, I haven’t had much time to even walk the grounds outside of the occasional trip to the compost pile to empty our kitchen scraps container. I had noticed through my office window that somehow the parsley that remained was a bright green mass clinging to the gentle folds of the dirt in the kitchen garden bed.
During my latest walk to the compost, the bright green parsley drew my eye and I stopped by the bed, realizing that either the lavender or rosemary should have been covered by now, or it would likely die if it hadn’t already. The lavender didn’t look much different than it had the last time I looked. The rosemary, though, looked as if it was desperately clinging to the last threads of its life force.
I honestly can’t recall if we had snow on the ground the first week of January last year. I do know that we’ve only had one snowfall worth shoveling so far this season. All else melted, and wasn’t very deep to begin with. Instead, we’ve had many rains.
Yet even knowing how cold it’s been, I still feel a bit foolish that despite the lack of snow on the ground, my instinct was to still try to replace the marker.
After the stick broke, I sat back on my haunches and realized that it was again a warm enough day that I hadn’t even bothered to put on a coat over the wool cardigan I often wear in the house. No gloves, no hat even. I was definitely starting to feel chilled, but also wasn’t feeling in a hurry to run inside either.
I have read that the snows will come late this year. How much we get, I am curious to know though my lazy self hopes it won’t mean too much shoveling. Especially since we never even started digging in the steps towards the front porch at the base of the driveway as we’d hoped to in the fall. That means that any snow that we don’t push all the way to the backyard will have to be lifted those few extra feet to clear the slope of the front yard.
The marker is now cleaned and in my center drawer with other markers I have yet to sort through of plants that made it or not this year. That smattering of markers and empty packets is just another fall/winter task I have yet to finish.
We still haven’t planted much ourselves, so for the most part, I didn’t feel the need to leave many markers behind of those that endured because it’s easier to remember them when we plant them ourselves. There is still a lot we have not yet identified, but each year we learn more.
This marker, why I didn’t take it in, I don’t know why. It’s not like we have anything else that looks like lavender in the kitchen bed. Foolish me again, perhaps, or forgetful me, I’m not certain. Now, though, it rests with others until I can make time to sort through and mark which we might need more to try again this year before we buy seeds.
