Pansies

It’s time! It’s time! We’re starting seeds inside the house this weekend!

A few years ago Forrest built this custom plant stand that fits just perfectly into the corner of our dining room. And by perfectly, I mean perfectly. It really can’t be removed without turning it in just the right angle at just the right moment. It holds six trays worth and when it is turned on, the lights make the whole room glow. On particularly gloomy days, I just go and stand next to it for a few seconds just to get a little taste of what spring will bring.

We usually start with flowers, for a couple of reasons. First, a lot of them are quite hardy and will last a long time in our above 50 but below 70 degree springtime. Second, if we start them too early and they die right after being transplanted, we can run over to the store and replace them pretty easily. I always feel a smidgen of guilt about that, but I get over it quickly. Third, I’m not too picky about which flowers survive. With vegetables, I want carrots AND cucumbers AND potatoes. With flowers, I just want…flowers. So I can plant a lot of them and whatever survives the early spring will make me happy.

We began starting pansies inside a few years ago. Before that, I had never really considered starting them from seed. You just bought pansies in a flat from the garden store, along with petunias, impatients, and geraniums. But I ordered some on a whim and they worked! Which is pretty much my only criterion for adding something to our garden plan. If it works, it’s in. If not, well, it depends how much I wanted you in the first place. I tried to make sweet potatoes work for three years until Forrest, eating a piece of the world’s smallest, saddest yam, looked at me wordlessly. We both busted up laughing and that was the end of that.

But pansies work, so we grow them. They are such happy little flowers and they last! A lot of our flowers come and go with the season, which I understand, but I’m usually not up to redoing the whole flower garden in July, so it helps if the plants can carry over from spring into summer.

So this weekend, I’ll commandeer the girls for as much of the work as I can – they never mind helping make the soil blocks – and we’ll get to work. By this time next week we’ll be eating in the pinkish light of the plant stand and counting the days until we see the first tiny green shoots come up.