It's Spring! Celebrate!

Every year, despite the weather, the calendar turns to March 20. But I don’t have to look at a calendar. I can tell it’s spring in a few other ways. The first is that my kids’ clothes get too small. My son will happily wear pants until they come up to his knees. My daughter is a different story. The minute an article of clothing feels the slightest bit tight, it goes to the pile for Big Brother Big Sister (http://www.bbbsa.org/) or a friend’s little girl. Sometimes I do have to nudge her along to get rid of some favorite shirts that come up to her belly. The next thing that comes out of her mouth is, “We gotta go shopping.” That’s ok by me if it means they are growing and healthy. In fact, they each went up a shoe size and a clothing size since the beginning of the school year. Hoorah!

The other event that happens at the beginning of spring is baseball spring training. We are Red Sox fans (http://boston.redsox.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=bos). My kids love David Ortiz, or as we fondly call him in Beantown, Big Pappie. It is hard to believe we are back into the baseball swing, so to speak. We are all healed from the end of the Patriot’s season and are fortunately still involved with the new and improved Celtics. The Bruins. Well, I don’t know about hockey so much.

And another big event that happens in the spring is gardening. I heard the most interesting and wonderful story on NPR. Go to www.npr.org/talkingplants and then down to the March 22 story titled, “Tips from an Amazon Gardener.” (See photo at left).

It is about the knowledge and practice of raising plants by a woman named Dona Raimunda, who lives in the Amazon. Some might call her eccentric. I call her fascinating. Take a few moments and learn some interesting facts about raising plants. In my experience of growing a veggie garden, I have found that less is more. Don’t crowd plants. Manure is cool.

No point, but I wish you a Happy Spring!