Mustards and Plums

6:00 am. Sunday, March 26.

Tweeee-chirp-chirp-chirp. Tweeee-chirp-chirp-chirp. Over and over and over in the early morning dark. More insistent than the alarm clock I set for 7:30 this morning, the call for a mate in the tree outside my window evaporates all hope for sleeping in.

I bought some little vegetable starts at the early-spring plant sale last weekend. Now I need to make room to plant them. Yesterday, taking advantage of a warm, sunny afternoon, I harvested the last of the overwintered purple peacock kale, just the smallest, most tender leaves, some new dark red beet greens and a bag full young mustard leaves. Last fall’s mustard crop is growing so robustly now, I couldn’t bring myself to cut it all down just yet. But I did pull out all the old kale stems to make room for the new starts. Very soon I will have to harvest the rest of the mustards. I harvested the last of the bok choi and pulled out the roots. I now have three good-sized pots available for planting. Later this morning, I’ll refresh the soil in the pots and add some balanced organic fertilizer, and plant the new vegetables.

For dinner, I sautéed all the greens with just a splash of tamari soy sauce. Fresh, tender mustards taste like an antidote – sharp, cleansing, refreshing, curative. And delicious.

Their resemblance to store-bought mustard greens is merely that of family members. From the garden, they are not as sharp, and more complex in flavor. I eat them slowly, wanting to know their taste intimately, lingering, observing, trying to name and fix it in memory. 

Flowering Plum

Today, we are blessed with another beautiful spring day. The snowy Olympic Mountains gleam in the morning sun. A crow outside my window shakes still leafless branches of the tall western dogwood as it yanks something invisible to me off the bare stems. Is it gathering little twigs for a nest? Avenues of pink blossoms line the streets as flowering plum and cherry rejoice.

First day of spring?

This morning wind whips the tree tops around with enough force and range of motion to whisk the very air into a foamy froth. Spring arrives today with a flat sky, so uniformly gray it might have been spray-painted on. How can the sky be so expressionless above such wild motion?

February 1^st felt like spring! I could feel it flowing in my blood and bones. I delighted in the sun gleaming on wet Skimmia berries and Viburnum buds showing color. 

But the planet stepped back from this threshold of Eden. At least here in the Northwest, cold, rain, wind, even snow prevailed through the weeks since, even on this first day of spring. However, friends have been telling me that in the Midwest and on the East coast, the mercury has soared to summer-time 70's. What mystery is this?