Our lilac bush is blooming and the scent makes me so happy. You can smell it all around the house. It’s always one of the highlights of spring. And then I walked up to my favorite coffee shop this morning and caught the scent again. They have a bush there also. Wonderful, wonderful.

I know…it’s a TED talk. But trust me, this one is good: “Let your garden grow wild.” Relatedly, this presentation by Doug Tallamy is the very thing that got Rachel involved in my fledgling garden project two years ago—and it has improved immensely since she got involved.

We’re regularly getting woodpeckers at our feeders now. And a few days ago I saw an eastern bluebird. Not bad for a place about ten blocks from the nearest large patch of woods. Word may be spreading among the bird community about our place.

In episode 103 of the Weird Studies podcast, J.F. and Phil consider the Tower card of the Tarot. As they have throughout the series, they especially refer to the anonymously written Meditations on the Tarot.

As with virtually every other episode, the whole thing is worth your time. But here I just want to note their discussion of gardening as an act of co-creation. Organic gardening, that is. As they note, modern chemical gardening and farming is, in fact, a stubborn imposition of human will on the natural world. But organic methods are a cooperation between human intention and nature’s ability.

Gardening in such a way is an act of trust, or faith. The human sows a seed according to their intention, but the fruition is a matter of hope based in the prior demonstrated vitality of the soil. The fruition may not come—but that is often because the human has made some error in judgment. The co-creative relationship may need to be adjusted on the human side, but faith in the living Earth is never misplaced.

Can you believe that Rachel used to say she had a black thumb?

OFA has an article on what to add to your soil in the spring. Here’s what we do. Three of our five raised beds have no contact with the soil so they need a bit more help. For those, we:

• use a garden mix from our local landscape company to fill them almost back to the top;
• bring them all the way to the top with purchased compost;
• fill in around plants with castings from our little worm farm.

For the areas where we plant directly in the ground, we first:

• put down cardboard to kill the grass and weeds, and
• cover that with mulch.

Once those areas are established, we simply add a fresh layer of compost every year. It seems to be working–there are worms active all over those areas, just beneath the surface.

I seem to have found myself in a terminological drift. Green Man’s Grotto originally referred to the notch behind the garage, bounded by the fence. This was the first area we planted outside the two original raised beds. While it’s not literally cave-like, the name made a certain sense. But now I find myself referring to the whole backyard as Green Man’s Grotto, which is nothing at all like a cave. This will have to be corrected.

New video: Green Man’s Grotto, February 2024. A tour of our backyard garden at its worst, with a few ideas for the upcoming growing season.

Woodland crocus is always the first flower in our yard—and this year it’s even earlier. According to Seek, I first recorded it on Feb 22 last year. They’re just gorgeous little things.

We (mostly Rachel!) made a decent dent in this weekend’s project. It’ll take at least one more round to dig out the … oh I don’t know … ten remaining tons of rock and landscape fabric.

How it looked last summer versus current state: