Spring Fever Struck

Daffodils always bring Spring’s message

All my life I’ve heard the phrase, “Spring Fever”, but oddly enough I don’t think I ever properly knew the meaning of it. I had the impression that it meant some kind of seasonal frenzy, a result of people becoming feverish to get on with the business of the new season of growing, spring cleaning, and activities like that.

It turns out that it is nothing of the kind, and I think I’ve been struck with a particularly strong case of spring fever this year.

What is Spring Fever, really?

Quite the opposite of my own off-the-mark definition, it refers to a type of tiredness and malaise that comes with the change of seasons. I’ve noticed this during both autumn and spring in years past, but this year I was hit hard!

Is it simply the change in season, the fact that this was a long drawn out and hard winter? Or the fact that I crammed gardening, exercise at the gym, and a long walk at the Arboretum in the the past few days? No matter, it is a regular enough phenomenon, that even the Scientific American remarks on it.

We are restless to get started with our projects… but if you are like me, at all, you might find the need for some extra naps to catch up to the renewed pace.

This is not all there is to the symptoms of Spring fever. It climaxes into heightened mating behavior as the season transitions to summer, presumably because of the biological shift of hormones in response to lengthening days. I don’t claim any signs of that part of the observable symptoms due to lengthening years! It’s all I can do to expend my energies in the garden beds at this point.

Springing Forward

Spending time outside more brought a scenario to my eye: my cat went a-hunting and the white flash of a fleeing cottontail that was earlier seen in the drive made a quick getaway.

Tulips are making their appearance around the yard, and the new ones from last autumn’s planting are being eagerly awaited. Being newly planted, they are just a bit delayed from the older plantings, which is normal.

Now that spring has finally arrived, there have been such seesaw temperatures, so hot that spring blooms go by and then the freezes, and, well, Ohio lives up to it’s reputation of changeability.

Tulipa ‘Renown’ in its third or fourth year here.

Garden Progress

The last couple of days work in progress:

Cut down the ornamental grasses
Readied two of the raised vegetable beds, one with permaculture method.
Begun weeding, continued removing last seasons debris.
Readying outdoor furniture, and setting up the screened porch for the summer season

Moving on to the planting that crowds around the Mother’s Day date, the rains are softening up the ground and everything is finally greening up. The only fear I have is that lingering winter means a hurry into summer’s blast without much of a chance to enjoy the spring.

Do you find yourself trying to play “catch up”? I’m not, even if I could ( still nursing that slow to recover knee). I have the luxury of gardening for myself, and if there are some years that I must do without new plants, a bit of weediness, or some other lack then I welcome what joys there are.

Why do we push ourselves so hard? Who are we in competition with? It is not worth such puny satisfaction to forego the enjoyment of our labors, the beauty of birdsong in the morning, or a quiet siesta in the perfect sunshine of a late spring afternoon.

Work, yes, but balanced with a few nods to spring fever laziness.

Random tulip that won’t give up and tasty dandelion tell tales

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© 2013 written for Ilona’s Garden Journal by Ilona E. An excellent blog.