Growing season is upon us

I sit in my chicken chair this sunny morning with a bowl of two perfectly soft-boiled eggs at five minutes. This seldom happens due to morning’s interruptions: spatting cats, telephone calls, laundry, for instance.

The sky couldn’t be more beautifully blue, tempting me to pull on my chicken boots, start Betsy my golf cart, and get goin’ with gardening.

Oh! How many months have I anticipated this gorgeous view from my kitchen window!

Le Coup, my re-purposed hen house, glows with sunshine. The white building with purple door (originally egg yellow), awaits my visit.

Yesterday, I at last planted purple flowers (names unknown) in the grain feeder I rescued years ago from an abandoned farm.

My late friend Andy, well-familiar with the area’s farm community, with the farmers’ permission, invited me to join him for visits to two local abandoned farms.

There, in tall grass of one farmstead, I almost tripped over the grain feeder.

Andy smiled. “Looks like it’s yours,” he said.

A reminder that everything has a lifespan, the grain feeder hangs to the right of Le Coup’s front door.

By the way, Andy also designed and built my hen house, what some women claim is a purebred “she shed”.

Andy also installed a window box below each window on the east and west side of the building.

Naturally, I chose purple blooms for the window boxes, the same cascading purple flower in the grain feeder.

Too much purple? That’s why I tucked in some white impatiens in each window box.

To the right of Le Coup I spy the mammoth, white pavilion, sip a cup of Starbuck’s Vanilla Lavender Coffee, smile to spy the wisteria vine greening up on the front posts.

I ponder what will inspire the next event to remove from storage and set up the barnwood tables and chairs Andy built before I closed Yule Love It Lavender Farm in 2014.

Indeed, everything on this marvelous, troubled Earth must pass away.

Meanwhile, I aim to plant flowers and food. In that order.

For growing flowers, waking to the delicate, dark purple blooms of Siberian iris, the wild, reckless orange, pink, and purple columbine, feed my soul as food feeds my body.

Oh! And the white and every shade of pink peonies make my fingers itch to cut and carry them into the house.

“A bloom in every room in vases from various places,” sings my soul.

Now, strange as I come from Appalachian farming stock, growing food doesn’t come as easily for me as growing flowers.

So much so that I’ve decided the raised bed I now spy in the backyard is the limit for my vegetable garden.

Could it be the name “Iris”, given by my mother, that prevails over food?

Now, nothing satisfied my mother more than a pot of her home-grown Kentucky Half Runner green beans.

And my father? Well, let’s say he worked hard with a hoe. However, a barber, he made music with his scissors.

Dear Reader, on a closing note, I think it remarkable that I inherited my father’s Warren hoe, and that his name was Warren. Indeed, I fulfill my destiny, with each blooming iris and puny lettuce plant.

Contact Iris at irisfarmletters@gmail.com