I love spring. Most people do. Set aside the possibility of a late season cold or flu. I’ve had those in the April and May time frame, and they can knock you out and ruin balmy days, budding flowers, and blossoming trees. And yes, I also get hay fever—allergies more generally—and that can also make your day long and miserable. Yet, I still love the springtime.
In the spring, many great things happen. Aside from the foliage popping out, gardening beckons. I have what I call my “beer garden.” Using six-by-six lawn timbers, I built a large rectangular structure—a big box—about three feet high, six feet wide, and twenty feet long. I then stretched chicken wire along the bottom to deter moles and groundhogs and lined the whole thing with plastic to keep out any chemicals from the timbers. Then I filled the box with soil, mixed in an appropriate amount of fertilizer consistent with the things I like to grow. Voila! My beer garden! No, I don’t grow beer, but it does allow me to garden while standing without kneeling down to plant, thin weeds, or harvest veggies. Oh, and if I do so with a cold beer nearby, the 8-inch topper I used to cap the structure is a great place to set my brew down.
As a final touch, I attached plastic piping at the corners and the midpoints of the long axis to add black plastic netting to keep the critters out. It works great until the cucumber vines decide to grow through the netting later in the season. With the good comes the bad. Such it is with life and beer gardens.
What do I like to grow? I love to experiment with different things. But generally, tomatoes, Roma, Big Boys, and cherry varieties. The last few years I’ve grown carrots with some success. I usually plant them thinly, water, and then cover them with a two-inch wide board for about two weeks. That way they root well, don’t get pulverized by the spring rain and when you remove the board, they are well on their way. Then I thin them out. Peppers, green bells, are our favorite. I have had success with peas, lima beans, and string beans, but they all take up a lot of space. Onions are fun, but somewhat of a bother to me. We like cucumbers: they grow well in this arrangement, but also can sprawl all over the place. This year, I’m thinking tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, carrots, and maybe pole lima beans. Never tried that before. That’s about all I can fit in my “beer garden.”
So, what’s the point of my gardening story? Well, in keeping with how I began this missive, spring creates beginnings. That’s why it’s wonderful to celebrate Easter if you’re of the Christian faith. For us, Easter is a great fresh start, a time of resurrection, forgiveness, and new life.
And spring is a time when many people begin new lives with graduations, new careers, and weddings. Spring, in that sense, is also a time of new life. I sometimes hope for a new spring for our nation as well. I love my country, like many of you. But I’m profoundly disappointed in what is occurring here. The list is long and frankly, I don’t wish to spoil my thinking here by articulating those sour points.
Yet what if we could have a new spring in America. What would that look like? What would spring forward? What would grow in a cold winter’s earth to stretch skyward soaking up both rain and sun and be bountiful? What could give us new roots, deeper ones, to absorb the civic nutrients our founders planted in America in the hope that we would also grow, prosper, and be bountiful in both the spirit of freedom and our pursuit of happiness?
I suspect we need some gardening advice to get on the right track. First, we need an education system that does not indoctrinate, but rather teaches us and our kids the fundamentals of reading, math, science (the real stuff) and history. And then how to think, not what to think. Second, we need good soil. That means strong families in which to root our growth as a civilized people. Strong neighborhoods, communities, and states also. And then, we’ll need a gardener to tend this garden. To care for what is planted, to thin the weeds, thorns, and tares that choke our spirit and steal our joy. Maybe someone who hopes we’ll grow in mercy, peace, and love for one another to be a new creation and a new beginning. Maybe we should look to a man who no longer occupies a garden tomb in Jerusalem. You’ll find that He has risen!
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