first growth: garlic spears

I couldn't reveal this special spring secret until Noah was home from Indonesia and got a chance to see it for himself, but last week, on a check of the garden beds, I first felt, and then saw, the first pale sturdy tips of our fall-planted garlic, just beginning to emerge from the ground.  The green leaf hasn't quite emerged, nor has the shoot really cleared the layer of straw mulch on top of the beds, but still, I know they are there, up out of the soil and looking for the sun.

Other things will need planting soon (or already), meaning there's a greenhouse to build.  And we've got to get to work on that deer fence. Spring is both excitement and anxiety, when you aren't quite ready for it all to uncoil just yet.

Currently::warm breeze

I just walked through the low pasture between us and the young-family neighbors who are coffee members.  The plants are all still hiding, for the most part, but it just sort of feels like the ground is getting ready to go.  There was a definitely spring-like breeze blowing down from Blue Mountain; the sort that is big and round, soft.  It had me involuntarily scanning the ground for lupine seedlings, though really they are still a ways off (and probably not in our pasture here, anyway).  

The work for a while has been all outreach for the coffee and storytelling class.  The sort of work that has no clear way to measure progress.  I'm long past ready for a day of something that havs a visible accomplishment:  shoveling manure, digging a garden bed, pruning the orchard.  We desperately need to build some sort of greenhouse so we can start our seedlings.  

There's an intense sense of needing to dig in and get to a more grounded kind of work, blowing in on that wind.