Across the Island, Indian plums have donned their crowns of snowy blossoms, and the pendant blooms of red-flowering currants are growing more crimson each day. Daffodils have sprung up, seemingly overnight. So, too, have crocuses, in their delightfully garish colors.
As Emily Dickinson wrote, “A light exists in spring.” And so it seems on Vashon, even though spring, officially, is still a couple of weeks away and a chill is again in the air.
The Farmers Market will soon open. Vashon’s first ever Food Summit just took place — on a weekend so deliciously sunny it must have felt hard for those who love to garden to slip into a high school auditorium.
And The Beachcomber, with this issue, has published its Home & Garden section, the paper’s annual rite of spring.
Time to reach for your spades, trowels or, perhaps, broadforks, and begin working the soil. And to dream of sun-ripened tomatoes.
The Beachcomber’s Home & Garden section, tucked into the middle of this week’s issue, will, we hope, inspire you to consider the deep satisfaction that can come from tending a garden. In some ways, the section starts right here on this page — where Debbie Butler explores the almost spiritual process of creating soil where none had existed. But it officially runs from pages 15 to 26, where you’ll find stories about our three local nurseries, about a home that sits lightly upon the land and about the savings one can experience when one grows one’s own vegetables. As a final tribute, there’s another garden-related story on page 27 — a look at the “Vashon Broadfork,” hand-forged on the Island.
Increasingly, it seems, gardening is a powerful and political act. It’s a way to make real the notion of self-sufficiency, to decrease one’s dependence on fossil fuel and to stand up to an industrial agriculture complex whose sins have been exposed by some of the best journalists of our age.
On Vashon, kissed by a maritime climate, it’s also easy. Though our soil can be tough, our climate is embracing. So too is our Island community, where support for gardening abounds.
So pull out the trowel. Forget about your Facebook page. And get outside.
The birds are calling.