It is two days from the first spinach planting date for my climate zone. My eagerness to begin gardening again is starting to turn into apprehension. One tends to forget how much work goes into gardening after the main crops are gathered and the garden is coasting through the last of the fall harvests. It is nearly time to gear up for the muscle-crippling work of putting in the garden again.

When it was weeks away from the spring ordeal, it was rather exciting to watch the planting dates come oozing up the organizer's schedule list as the household tasks drizzled down and a few projects got deleted. Now the long delayed projects are converging on the early planting dates and I can see a time and strength crunch coming.

We only get a short winter break from gardening here. When I was a child, I rather thought of winters as being long and occasionally blessed with school-closing snow. I was brain-washed with wintry scenes of snowball fights and snowmen that only occasionally happened this far south. Whoever wrote those books and TV shows about American winters must have been a die-hard d--- Yankee.

Once I seriously got interested in gardening, I discovered climate zones and why people bought their pea seeds so early at the local garden centers and supermarkets. It no longer seems peculiar to see seed racks freshly stocked when I would still be expecting snowfalls to ice the roads. Now I know that I'd better finish buying anything to go in the garden soon or it won't arrive by the planting date range.

Global warming has nothing to do with it, as the people freezing up north now can attest. Children grow out of their school calendars as they begin to organize their schedules according to adult responsibilities. Now the deadlines that I prepare for are whether or not I will get things done on time in the garden or the house. A missed planting range might be punished by a crop that won't ripen in time to harvest it before heat makes it bolt or frost kills the plants. I can't ask the teacher for an extension with a deduction for lateness when Mother Nature is in charge of the classroom. I might be lucky if the weather stays reasonably nice to suit the crop, but there are no guarantees.

The weather is still flirtatious, bouncing between cold days with hard frosts some nights and spring-like days with milder nights. I haven't even finished mulching all the beds and the spinach planting date is nearly here with pea planting in about two weeks more. I have enough beds ready for that, but nearly half the garden has gotten only a sprinkling of lime awaiting the shredded paper mulch. Our much overworked paper shredder, Snarly, has probably already savaged a life-time worth of paper into mulch and there are still stacks of paper waiting to be turned into mulch to cover the beds allotted for later plantings. It still rips away at the sheets poked down its maw, but it is slowing down and overheating more quickly.

I'm thinking of sneaking back to the discount store for another shredder, hoping that they haven't already sold out. I keep thinking that surely I'll get caught up with the paper hoarded since my family's discovery that it had value in the garden, but so far the pile is still prosperously high and occasionally falls over on an innocent cat which was only doing its feline duty climbing on it.

I'm still adding shredded paper to Rapunzel, which is slowly turning its load into compost. Baby's load is making some progress but not much since it doesn't stay as well-insulated as Rapunzel's larger load. Once again, Rapunzel is winning over Baby in making compost. The below freezing nights stalled Baby and kept some kitchen scraps on the outside of the load from breaking down for a while, but Rapunzel seems to be devouring them quite well despite the cold. It is the harder-to-digest paper that is taking longer.

I keep running the mulching mower over new bags of shreds in the garden beds after piling leaves on top of them, so there is enough area with fluffy brownish mulch over it to get the early seeds in if I'm careful to keep one area available for the onion plants I ordered this year. I haven't tried plants before, only sets, so I was curious to see how they would like being planted in the old tomato patch. That planting date starts in less than a month, so I've got a package coming to look forward to instead of lurking quite so much at fabric.com.

It's not that fabric.com has lost its allure. They're having yet another sale there, tempting me with more pretties. I've been heeding the organizer with some diligence, meshing crafting with housework and gardening. The second sweater is coming along well with the front nearly done, and I started working on one shirt. I missed getting some gorgeous floral fabric which sold out in a flash, but I have so many boxes stacked by my bed that the cats keep innocently tipping them over when trying to climb over them to reach the window. I'm trying to keep a vow to finish a few more projects before I order from fabric.com again. Does anyone believe that?