wait for it

Today, April 9th, it hailed. And it was also in the thirty and blowing rain much of the day.

All of which is to say it was not a good day to be a plant.

There is this things that happens with the first warm days of spring, where you forget how fickle the weather can be and you are tempted to plant absolutely everything out. And for awhile, it might even seem like you are getting away with it.

But sooner or later there comes a string of weather that makes you regret planting so soon, as your seeds fail to germinate and start to rot in the ground, and the dirt plasters over with mud and forms a hard crust.

Back when I was vegetable farming, we kept much better records than I do now of when we sowed and planted, what the weather was, and when we were able to harvest. All of which reinforced the truth that you can sow twice in the spring, weeks apart, and that first harvest from those plantings often happens just days apart. And what is more, the later plantings often produce better and suffer far less insect damage, because they grew vigorously right from the beginning, while the earlier planting struggled and grew slowly and got attacked by insect pests precisely because it struggled and grew slowly.

So this is the time of year when I am pretty regimented in what I plant and when. And I am prepared to sow again. And I am prepared to wait. Because just because you can, doesn't mean you should.