Growing season begins Monday

Today, tomorrow, and Sunday, May 11-13, are the days known in France as the Ice Saints' days. On the Catholic calendar, as you probably know, nearly every day is dedicated to a saint. People named after a saint get congratulations and maybe a toast or even a present on their saint's day.

The peonie flowers are starting to drop their petals.

The three saints called the "ice saints" are Mamert (died in 474), Pancrace (d. 304), and Servais (d. 384). All of them have now been replaced on the Catholic calendar by more recent saints, so the tradition of honoring them as the ice saints goes far back in time.

Tomato plants in little pots waiting to be set out in the garden

Why are they called the ice saints? Well, it has nothing to do with them, actually. It's just that according to popular wisdom these dates, May 11-13, are often the last days of spring on which cold weather with frost and even a freeze will occur. After les Saints de Glace, it is safe to plant your garden.

Roses are in full bloom right now, three weeks early

So the growing season "officially" begins on May 14 — that's next Monday. We've had a very warm spring, and we could probably have planted our garden on April 1 this year. But better safe than sorry. In past years we have planted our garden as late as June 1 and had spectacular results.

Yesterday I set out geraniums in the planter boxes
under the new kitchen window

The days are so long now that the plants get a lot of sunlight. Dawn breaks at 6:00 a.m. and night falls now at about 9:30 p.m. In a month, it will stay light until about 11:00 p.m. The long hours of daylight last through July and into August.

Walt's getting the herb garden cleaned up
and planted for the year

Yesterday I finally got the fourth vegetable garden plot tilled up. I had done the other two back in April, before we got Callie. We have a gas-powered rototiller, and the job would be impossible without it. The ground is hard — it's mostly clay — and rocky. And then last fall I let the grass and weeds take the plots over, and the weeds have had time to grow thick, long roots that I now have to break up by running the tiller through the plots over and over again.

The plot in the front of the vegetable garden
is the one I tilled up yesterday.

It took more than an hour to till up a plot that is a square 15 feet by 15 feet. And that rototiller is a heavy piece of equipment to work with. I requires a lot of pushing a pulling, and you have to haul it around when you reach the edge of the plot. It's back-breaking, especially at my age. But it's worth it for the results we get in July, August, September, and October.

Volunteer nasturtiums have come up in a plot I tilled earlier.
Now I have to plow them under when I till the plot
one more time before we start planting the garden.

The noise of the rototiller freaked Callie out, but Walt sat with her for a while not too far from where I was working so that she could get the idea it was OK. Earlier, he taught Callie how to play with the frisbee. Here's the video.

Callie learned the game very fast, but after three or four fetches she was exhausted. She went back into the house and slept for an hour or two. Nice!