Nov 21, 2013 3 min read

The last thing I wanted to do last weekend was to dig in the dirt, but for years I’d been yap-yap-yapping about the wonders of a cutting garden, and so digging it was.

The yapping was along the lines of, “Imagine, fresh flowers on every mantle every day!”, and so the farmer in the house came home with all the tulip and lily bulbs he could round up. Just when I was settling in with a new book, he appeared in the doorway holding a bulb-digger in one hand and a pair of gardening gloves in the other.

“Let’s go,” he said.

Planting bulbs is the perfect exercise in delayed gratification. You have to be able to see around the corner to spring, knowing that your work today will pay off much later.

I hate winter. It is a long, tiring slog – particularly in the dirty-snow weeks of March when spring is closer but still a few stubborn snowstorms away.

For years, I’d buy bulbs and then either neglect or forget to plant them, and by the time the snow melted, it was too late.

The farmer had done the heavy work already, having rototilled the space alongside the house and then filled it in with topsoil. This was not the hard, scrubby ground out front – the soil that required a jackhammer to punch a hole deep enough to plant a bulb – no, this was soil like chocolate cake, rich and soft and ready. He had designed the garden, laying out the bulbs in a pattern that, in the spring, would produce a field of tulips punctuated by little trios of lilies. It was mathematical in its precision, I’m sure, but honestly, it just looked like dirt with a million bulbs scattered on top.

And I do mean a million.

My job was to dig a hole, drop in the bulb, push the dirt out of the hole digger back into the hole and then tamp it down a little. That sounds simple until you’ve done the 50th one, and then you want to stop. But you can’t because there are 300 more bulbs waiting to be put to bed. At first, I would plant three bulbs and then stand up to stretch my back. That started to hurt, so I stayed down in the locked-and-loaded position, a decision that would taunt my back for days after.

I worked on a farm the summers I was in college. I remember a contraption that took the back pain out of planting tomatoes. While someone drove the tractor, I sat in the back with trays of baby plants. As the tractor moved along, a mechanized tool would dig a hole, I would drop in a plant, the tool would fill in with dirt and we’d move along to the next hole.

“I’d like one of those tractors for this job,” I told my tulip farmer, and he just stared, regarding me as the slacker that I am. For every bulb I planted, he planted 52. Come spring, his tulips and lilies will be tall and bright and mine will be withered little Q-tips.

Not that we’ll ever see that.

Sunday morning I hobbled outside, shivering and holding my sore back. Some of the holes were empty, the bulbs having been unearthed and plucked out like prizes in a box of Cracker Jack.

Stupid squirrels. Stupid back. Stupid winter.