Baby It's Cold Outside

Last week this time, it was -20 outside with the windchill.  Our gardens looked like this:


















While it was freezing outside, Smoosh and I were happily curled up inside doing what we love to do best this time of year; starting to plan out this year's garden.  Smoosh is at the perfect age of enjoying everything there is about gardening - he loves going through the seed catalogs with me, he loves talking about which plants we should grow, and he even loves have a part in helping me clean up the downstairs "grow room" to start planting some of our seeds for the year.  Otter went through this age and now sporadically will jump in and out of the garden conversations.  Beans will get more excited once she actually is able to see flowers and feel the warm air on her little cheekers.  Squeaks just enjoys undoing whatever it is we are doing at the moment, including dumping dirt onto a clean floor, removing seeds from where she thinks we have "hidden them" (in the dirt), etc.  But Smoosh, ahh, Smoosh is right where I am; he can dream it and imagine it and warms up just thinking about it.  One night, he came into the room around 8:30 (an hour past his bedtime!) but I was very happy to let him crawl into bed and look through the pile of seed catalogs I was already purusing.  For 1/2 hour, he quietly thumbed back and forth through the pages, every once in awhile saying "oh, look at dat" or "I didn't know you could grow dat stuff," even an occasional "hmmm, I wonder what dat tastes like."  I don't mind staying up way past a bed time if it includes happily chasing down the dream of this year's garden.

The next day we pulled the catalogs out again and this time actually started the planning.  There are the garden square plots that get printed up and names of plants penciled in, erased, and penciled in again at least 10 times before we can actually plant anything in May.  Smoosh has very definite opinions about what should be planted where and he loves to point at the different boxes and flipping the pages to determine where the plants will be going.  This is a process that will be repeated several times over before the plants are there.

Smoosh and I even pull out the seed packets that have been patiently waiting for us.  We pull out each one, rewrite how many seeds there are, which ones we have, and record the times for seeding, transplanting, and harvesting; as if we do not know by now how long each one will take....we then gently tuck in the container of seeds and tell them we will be back in a few weeks to start planting.