csa time

The local CSAs are beginning in Baltimore. With the combination of the brilliant spring sun, the abundant spring rains and the glorious cool weather we should have a bumper crop of produce this year.

After so many years of lamenting the absence of spring, of feeling like we went from late winter to the midst of summer, from jacket weather at the beginning of the week to shvitzing by the end, we have finally been blessed with a spring whose glory merits praise. Something to tell the grandchildren about, just like the stunning blizzard of a few years ago.

Days that are cool at night and beckoningly lovely throughout the afternoon. Easy enough to work up a sweat, but only if you earned it. Not the humid, blistering warmth that melts you simply on contact.

Breakfast on the patio or porch mornings. Fresh and clean and renewing air.

I am on my back porch as I type this, looking out over our heavily wooded backyard. Various pieces of heavy equipment and previous heavy use tore up the ground around the trees seven years ago. For six years, the backyard stayed barren of ground-cover. The earth lay there, bare and forlorn, exposed to the elements. Only the relative flatness of the land, and a deep cover of leaves in the fall, prevented us from losing so much topsoil.

Then, sometime last summer, poof, the further section of our lawn began to sprout little patches of green. Not grass or high stalks that needed to be tended. Just curled, tender short ground-cover that modestly covered the naked earth. A little skirt of green, inching out here and there.

Somehow over the winter, through the magic that is the earth's regenerative powers, that gentle, rolling, curling ground-cover migrated almost all the way to the house. Our backyard, while native, is not wild or overgrown but softly blanketed with sprouts reaching from side to side and all the way back to the pachysandra in the woods.

Why can't we grow lawns like this - lawns which need no tending, no mowing, no use of fossil fuels for fertilizers or trimming or edging? Lawns that are sturdy to walk on and resilient and verdant and nature friendly? I would be someone who markets the seed or seedlings of this ground-cover, and others that do as well, would make a nice living.