I step outside, and it's coming up on mid April, and the temperature is in the nineties, and I think, Lord, but it has to be time to plant. Then I check the calendar, and there's that average last frost date, just a week away. And the forecast, for summerlike warmth, all the way to that average date and beyond.
Some years, if I go into the ground early, it means an early harvest. But others? Others are like this year, when despite a run of days hot enough to draw sweat standing, the evening wind suddenly turns cold and fierce.
I'd gotten my basil in the ground ten days ago, all the little seedlings that I'd started back in late March. Surely, surely we were done with winter. But winter wanted one last word in, and so up went the frost warnings.
They were right on the cusp, particularly for life here in my inner suburb. Heat island effect is a real thing in Annandale, with temperatures here usually running five or six degrees warmer than they do out near my rural congregation. That's a buffer, but one can't be sure, particularly with frost sensitive seedlings.
So I covered all of them at sundown last night, putting each under an inverted growing pot. Heat would be retained and frost staved off. Hopefully. Or maybe not. My plan: remove the pots only when the morning sun cleared the little rise to the East, and the air and soil were warmed.
Stepping out into the still morning chill, I looked across the lawn, at the frosted tips of the recently mown grass. Then I glanced down the little bed by my driveway. There were the pots, in neat little rows. Beneath them, there were seedlings, unobserved and unobservable, and each those seedlings were either alive or dead.
Which was it? Which outcome might it be?
I'd have to wait until the sunrise.
Posts
