Today, Pete and I arrived at the garden center as the clouds burst and torrential rain sent huge carts of flowers sailing across the parking lot. Pete chased one down as I pushed a cart back onto a sidewalk. Hollow-eyed employees, hair dripping onto their faces, apologized to us. When I smiled, they did not smile back. We wondered what’d just happened as rain pounded the canvas roof. We stared around and stared at each other for a few minutes before remembering why we’d come: window boxes and containers. Our space is very limited. We make the most of it with containers we can move from place to place, plant and re-plant, and I’d run out of containers that fit into the window box frames. On a lark, we picked up two strawberry plants we hope won’t join the Choir Invisible like their predecessors, which we refer to as mulch. One of Pete’s clients gave him two odd urns. When the skies cleared this evening, I transplanted the strawberries into the urns and placed them on our front steps.

Later this week, it’ll be time to start the second set of seeds for lettuces, chard, spinach, sorrel and herbs for when the first set has been picked, bolted or suffered some disaster. You can’t rule out incursions by groundhogs or mysterious blight, so: containers, compost, potting soil, seeds. I growl at squirrels.