Late Winter
February 1 to March 22
Budswell begins sometime around Brigid’s Day, also called Imbolc or Candlemas, with the Chinese Lunar New Year is sometime near. Day length grows rapidly, buds swell, and bulbs push through duff. Budswell ends, and springtime begins with the Spring Equinox, celebrated around the world since time before memory, now remembered as Nawruz, Higan, Easter or Passover.
Winter still holds the land in its wet cold grip, but many creatures, marking the day length, know that the green flush of spring is just around the corner. The mountains are hopefully deep in snow, a vast crystalline reservoir insuring summer river flow.
Wild Creatures and Wildcraft
Wild salmon eggs begin to hatch, and alvins live in the gravel, eating their eggs sacks, until one-by-one they being to drift downstream, looking for eddies and still water in which to forage.
The high country is still only accessible to back-country skiers that must contend with chilling rain and slushy spring skiing. In the lowlands the early shoots of forbs and some trees provide vegetables long before spring gardens are planted.
REVegetation
The final push to get all bare stock in the ground is now. Everything left un-planted must be potted up and watered for another summer–good motivation to keep planting. Elderberry (Sambucus spp.) will break buds early and are particularly vulnerable if they unfurl leaves with weak roots. Cuttings can be thrown in the cooler to buy time.
Ideally you finish the bulk of planting and have time to tie up loose ends, and look ahead to the next year. Look back at your plantings. Have you documented plant counts and areas? Have you written down any experiments you might forget? Where will you need to provide the most aftercare? Where are the places where you will create disturbances over springtime and bloom in preparation for next winter’s plantings?
If you want to introduce mulch crops by seed, now is your last chance to create rough seed beds. Machines might be too rough on sensitive soils still too wet to be worked, but a tillage hoe can cover lots of ground.
THE Garden
Bed preparation is underway for the earliest crops, if you can find a dry week to do the work. Any mulch laid in fall is now thin and rotten. Perennials that have hidden all winter may show their shoots enough to be dug and divided. Overwintering crops will also wake up soon. Any remaining root crops, often biennials by evolution, will soon begin their final expenditure. There will soon be abundant shoots and seeds from overwintering mustards.
Waves of transplants begin under plastic and glass. The conundrum: direct sow or transplant? There are advantages to both, and early seeding is risky, both from weather and slugs. This is the last moment for tending the tool shed, before the continuous tilling, and weeding, and seeding, and thinning, and transplanting of spring begins. Tend your tools, tidy your work spaces, Assess your stocks and supplies.
Earthworks, Construction and Hazards
The last floods of spring come. In some cases, warm rain falls on melting snow, sending a surge down the rivers. Any mistakes around erosion or flood management have been made plain by the relentless rains.
Large scale construction is a slow motion dance. Next year’s earthwork season is closer than it might seem. The allowed time for in-water construction work begins in Bloom, at the beginning of the dry season. Restoration project managers are nailing down permits, and are competing for the best contractors, reviewing bids.
Politics and Government
The state and federal legislative processes are in full swing. Strategies developed following last years elections begin to take shape. Lobbyists organize their troops and create spectacles to compete for time and attention. The process of governance is ruled by never ending events and pageantry. Political capital is hoarded and spent.
At the state, however, the main even is just beginning to unfold. After positions and new directions are debated, elevated, or buried, comes the main event: the budget. Words can be loud but hollow, and money talks louder than words.
Over at the nation’s full time legislature, the drama can play on for months, particularly in election years. Agencies may still be waiting for their budgets that would have begun back in October. Executive programs are often hoarding or conservatively spending based on a calculus of continuing resolutions and rumors, and prepare to jump depending on which way the dice fall.
Previous: The Darkness
Next: Springtime
This post is part of a standing body of work to capture the seasonal nature of our lives, and how they might apply to the work of the Ecosystem Guild and Restoration Camping.