APRIL

THE FOURTH MONTH • 2021 APRIL HATH 30 DAYS

Where the calm river glides along, The patient angler takes his seat. –Thomas Miller

Farmer's Calendar

Long before the garden begins to produce, it achieves perfection, a condition from which its subsequent career, however fruitful, can be only a decline. Where I live, that moment comes, say, two-thirds of the way through April, when you plant the peas and radishes and lay out the rows for the rest of the garden.

It's in the laying out of the rows that you can make your garden a success of a kind impossible in later months. I split new stakes and get a ball of twine to mark the rows. I get a 20foot tape so I can keep the rows honest. Putting them in by eyeball would be good enough for the plants, but it wouldn't be good enough for the mind and it's the mind I'm gardening for. I make sure the twine is taut, the lines straight, and the corners square. I take these pains in the garden before it really is a garden because doing so is a kind of magic to make me a better gardener. I'm trying to fool myself. It doesn't work. In six weeks, the garden will be a mess; in ten, it will be a jungle. But for right now, it looks pretty sharp, doesn't it? Today the garden looks for all the world as though somebody around here knew what he was doing.

Listen to the Farmer's Calendar at Almanac.com/Podcast.