The most challenging part of Spring is my yearly delivery of 10 yards of compost. I used to rent a truck and go and pick it up myself. Now, I order it from a nearby nursery sometime in early March and, after it is delivered by an enormous truck, backing into my driveway and dumping all of it onto a tarp, it gets shoveled onto each garden bed and around every shrub, and recently planted tree. It is a huge amount of work. Until it gets done, the pile just sits there in the driveway, a patient reminder of Jobs Not Quite Finished. Everyone I can cajole into doing it helps, and the house is quite muddy at the end of it, from all of us going in and out with muddy boots on, but the result, in the garden, is breathtaking. The plants love it. Over several years of doing this, the soil is amazing, and the plants are incredibly healthy, withstanding onslaughts of bugs, and weeks in the summer with no rain, with impunity.

And the beds after they’re done, look like the gardens in story books. You would think I had a full time gardener. All the leftover detritus from the Fall that blew into the beds over the Winter, is covered up, to dissolve quietly, undercover, and the only thing you can see, other than the rich deep black of the compost, is the green shoots of the bulbs coming up.