February

February. When I was a child, I always dreaded the approach of February. While I know it’s not, for me February is the coldest, darkest, most damp, month of the year. Just raw. And depressing.

Now, I can’t wait for February. Don’t get me wrong. I still think February is a miserable month in terms of the weather, but I look forward to it for one reason. Time to plant the seeds!

You see, in the past twenty years or so, I’ve become a bit of a gardening freak. When my wife and I bought our first house, one of the first things we did was put in a small 8’ x 8’ garden. The following year we doubled it, and the next year we doubled it again. In the home we currently live, the garden occupies about 50 x 50, with an additional couple of hundred feet square for fruit trees and berry bushes . We spent the better part of the summer physically in the garden.

My wife and I have gone a bit ……..insane with the volume of plantings we are doing from seed. We start almost everything from seed, more for the opportunity to see us through February. Today, she is preparing the trays that we use to plant our “babies” in. We will start planting soon. We argue about the date to begin the plantings. Last year, I set my hot pepper seeds in the second week of the month, and the tomatoes in the fourth week. They didn’t get in the ground for 11 and 9 weeks, respectively, so they were a bit leggy at the end, but the act of raising them saw me through the rough patches of winter.

None of this has anything to do with furniture, of course, but there are a lot of similarities I draw between furniture building and building a garden. Both take shape slowly, behind the scenes, starting as bits and pieces of stuff, and eventually coming together as a cohesive whole, and when the piece is finished or the first tomato is plucked, the tangible results are equally satisfying to me.

It may be dank and cold now, but pretty soon when you come to visit me on a Saturday in Rockville, I’ll have a basket or two of my fresh picked veggies for you to sample, all because I took this time now in nasty old February.