MARCH

March Hare and the Worm Moon

March for me is always associated with beginning of gardening season. It is still mostly cold and rainy but now I get couple decent days weekly to get out and start cleaning and planning new garden.

The incredibly satisfying part of gardening is that you always leave it in better shape than you found it. Even few minutes spent tidying up makes such a difference, and it gets registered by my mind. It tells me that I made my world a little better, perhaps little friendlier to the eye, or to a honey bee, hungry after scarce winter diet.

Gardening is a funny thing, because it’s never really done. Unlike landscaping, gardening is ongoing process and earth teaches you along the way. About working with it and not against it,  about necessity and inevitability of changes, about where flowers like to grow and where they refuse to do so, and where mama bunny hides her nest.

And about what worms like to eat.

Full moon in March called Worm Moon because earthworms starting to move to the surface as soil warms up. They are hungry and I make sure they get enough to eat. We’re on a mission to make dirt.

I always say that piles of dirt I and my earthworms make over our lifetimes will be my legacy. Started as sun baked red clay my dirt is now dark and crumbly and delicious, and I take a great pride in it.  It’s my response to sanitized experience of modern culture - I get feral, I team up with worms and ground beetles and we make dirt with last year leaf litter, shredded papers, egg shells and that cabbage from the corner of my fridge I bought last year when I was full of good intentions. Everything gets turned back into primordial soup of life.

And earth laughs back in flowers, and tomatoes, and butterflies, and yes, more worms.

And we keep on making dirt.