Spring Fever

      Spring 2018 has made us play a waiting game.

      It’s had gardeners looking out our windows at all that demands being done — rather than being out there raking leaves and pulling weeds. It’s had anglers pushing their snooze buttons in hopes that another hour — or another morning — will use up all the energy in the wind. It’s even forced the flowers to hold their blooms tight.

      On the other hand, it’s been great weather for planning and preparing.

      If I had been using my time wisely, instead of bewailing the cold, I’d have been planning this year’s advance on my landscaping challenges. 

      That realization burst on me with the clarity of the morning sun breaking the horizon as I talked with high-achieving landscape architect Sheila Brady for this week’s Home and Garden Guide feature, Planning and Planting Your Native Garden.

       It burst on me guiltily, for planning is the hardest part of a job for me. Especially in spring, I’m like a leashed dog tempted by a squirrel. Let me at it! my energies are screaming. 

      Me, I’m making up for the time I spent regretting.

      A couple of years ago, in a landscaping class, I drew a plan of our property and had it nicely mounted. Once I locate it, I can get planning with diligence — Brady’s word for what it takes to make a good plan. Chill days, howling-wind days, rainy days are all just fine days for looking up lovely gardens and penciling in planting and bedding shapes on my plan. 

      When, eventually, spring gives us a warm day — without showers — I’ll have picked my starting point and set some realistic ambitions for this spring’s projects.

      The first nice hour, I’ll dig up soil samples from the places I’m going to work this year, dry them and send them in for testing. While they’re processing — just a few days — weather permitting, that raking and weeding can start.

     Garden planning and (eventual) planting is just one front on the relentless advance of spring keep-up chores. Home-improvement is the rose-colored term we give to such projects. In fact, much of what we do is just plain maintenance, keeping nature from reclaiming our homesteads as it has the abandoned property we all, in dismay, watch crumble back into its elements. 

      Bay Weekly’s annual Home and Garden Guide arms you to advance on many of those fronts. In it you’ll find stories, tips from local professionals and a directory of local businesses to help you on projects ranging from planning-intense to impetuous quick fixes for fits of spring fever.

      So whether you want to buy or sell a house or wash the windows and landscape the house you happily call home, you’ll find experts here to help you get it done.

      If your spring fever is of the get-it-done-now sort, you’ll value the tip from Lucia Tucker of Cleaning Maid Easy for going after winter bedding and washing like a football tackle. If you want to add that kind of energy to your team, call now, for services like that are in demand this time of year.

      For quick fixes, you’ll find stores throughout Chesapeake Country offering retail therapy to lower your spring-fever temperature while we endure all these days we’re planning rather than planting. 

       You have in your hands this week a Guide to inspire your spring projects, get you going and see you through to a summer that rewards you with some time for being as well as doing. Enjoy.