My neighbor, sullen about her garden back in March and threatening to do not much more than put in a tomato plant or maybe some spinach, lately has been a dervish in the backyard.
She’s been pruning her baby apple trees, behaving tenderly toward the spots in her lawn run off by kids practicing all manner of team sports, and taste testing the early shoots pushing out of the first of five 12-square-foot veggie plots that could potentially — OK, will — be filled this season. Spinach, lettuce, peas and arugula so zingy that she admits she could probably graze it all away in a single stand up.
“Here! Taste a leaf! It has dirt on it, but eat it anyway,” she says one evening as the sun begins to sink behind our yards.
There’s something about the greening of the year that has broken through both of our bad cases of dry-winter malaise. Lilac bushes that went bare last year, this spring are heavy with perfumed flowers. The cottonwoods are giving a whisper of shade. The pear and plum trees still hold their delicate blooms.
And the thick cascades of chokecherry blossoms, like that square foot of arugula, hint at the bounty that may lay ahead.
Dana Coffield, The Denver Post
