Spring

Tuesday

Dan Fox

How I flouted a cardinal French gardening rule

“C’est ma faute,” I called up to the local old boys as they strolled past my potager, chuckling among themselves. I tried to match their levity, but it was obviously affected; they could sense my panic. It was late-April and my garden resembled an eccentrically out-of-season Halloween scene, with tomato plants standing eerily motionless like infant ghosts, wrapped from head to toe in protective fleece. Everyone knows that 41°F is too cold for tomatoes, but spring had been deceptively warm, and I couldn’t help myself. AccuWeather had issued a grim prediction for the night’s minimum temperature. Only a few days previously, I had been openly proud that my plants had been in the ground for two weeks. I felt foolish and impetuous.

gardening

Tuesday

Roger Kimball

A Champagne winter

Most readers will come to this column in February. “That’s the dead of winter,” you say (if you are in the Northern hemisphere, anyway). But I write at the absolute nadir of daylight. For some years now, I have kept a daylight diary. I generally start in mid-October and go through the return of daylight-saving time in March. It takes that long to convince me that summer really is on its way back. When I started, I simply noted the time the sun rose, when it set and how much daylight we had that day. I eventually got a little more elaborate, noting the phases of the moon and such, and making very brief annotations about significant events. Every year (so far), it’s been a story with a happy ending.

winter

Sunday

Roger Kimball

A drinker’s diary

It is a crisp, beautiful spring day as I write. The air is light and clear. The skies are a color I have always thought of as Virgin Mary blue, punctuated here and there by attractively arranged puffs of clouds at their whitest and least threatening. The greens of the verdure are at their most flashing and emerald-like. That freshness will be enveloped by summer fullness by the time you read this, a contingency that makes me conclude that something like an abbreviated wine-diary — some of what Kimball drank during the month of May — might appeal to the connoisseurs and aficionados of the column. Let’s start at the tip-top.

wine drinkers diary champagne

Thursday

Jane Stannus

In praise of burnt Basque cheesecake

Spring, as Chaucer pointed out, occasionally has the curious effect of making people “long on pilgrimage to go / And palmers to be seeking foreign strands / To distant shrines renowned in sundry lands.” The May morning may come when you find it in your heart to pick up the pilgrim’s staff and wend your way along the paths of olden Spain to Santiago de Compostela. There are several ancient ways to reach the distant shrine of St. James, and if you are a lover of the road less traveled, you may find yourself drawn to the Camino del Norte, which begins in the western Pyrenees of the Basque country, then hugs the long beaches and jagged cliffs of the Atlantic shoreline through Cantabria and Asturias before curving inland through Galicia to the Apostle’s tomb.

Basque

Sunday

Teresa Mull

A woman for all seasons

One of the things I love most about living in Pennsylvania is experiencing all four seasons. They are pronounced, and regardless of how long you’ve lived there, the changes in weather are always remarkable. People comment on the weather constantly, as if the four things it might be doing outside — being warm, cold, wet or dry — are novel any old day. Whether these remarks are upbeat or grumbly seems to depend on one’s age and if snow is more likely to result in a day off school or a bout of rheumatism. For me, though, a change in the seasons — any season — is a sentimental event. It’s as if nature is poignantly reminding me that time is passing. A late February warm spell this year inspired me to do some spring cleaning.

seasons

Monday

Teresa Mull

Seed catalogs and their rejuvenating power

Winter’s bleakest days have set in. “The holidays” are a distant memory. Rose-colored resolutions to wake up earlier, eat healthier and exercise have gone the way of Dry January — all a wash, as you quickly discovered the only antidote for your Seasonal Affective Disorder was something equally cold and dark. You glimpse the N/A beers in the back of the fridge the same way you spy the sun — in passing, and with a feeling of faded hopefulness. As you lug bags of empty bottles to your sidewalk, you glance up at the brightish blob lending a hazy glow to the grayscale landscape. You deposit your clanging bag of glass and cans beside your Christmas tree’s corpse and shuffle back inside to refill the fridge and cover up reminders of your dalliance with the sober-curious.

seed

Sunday

Teresa Mull

Guardian writer doesn’t get why Americans love fall

We Americans are used to the Brits weighing in on our affairs. I try to view their concerns with compassion, as a hard-to-kick habit leftover from the pre-Revolution days, or an endearing tendency they can’t help, like when your mother continues to remind you to wear a coat in winter even after you’re well into your forties. But our English cousins have finally crossed the line. Writing for the Guardian, Arwa Mahdawi vilifies that which we Yanks hold most sacred: “the season they call ‘fall.’” According to Mahdawi, autumn is “overrated” “rubbish.” Instead of pumpkin-spicing everything, she suggests we elevate another squash variety, “the humble courgetti,” as our favorite flavor profile of the season. I simply cannot let such abuse go unchallenged.