Rhubarb is always one of the harbingers of spring, but I can’t recall a season when it’s been this early.  Likewise the asparagus, which in a typical year emerges some time between April 9th at the earliest to Apring 19th at the latest.

Walking the garden this morning, I noticed two asparagus spears poking out of the ground, six weeks or so earlier than in a typical year.

The nectarine and peach trees that I put in last year are about to flower as well.  If prior years are any indication – though I’m beginning to believe that this year is a very special year – this early flowering is almost a guarantee that there will be ZERO fruit this year from any fruit tree.  Snow and rain and stormy weather typically ruin the early flowers, and so very little fruit results.  In fact, I haven’t had a really good fruit year – plums, pears, cherries – in maybe 5 years?

Gardening, though, is a necessarily optimistic endeavor.  Put enough seeds in the ground, take enough cuttings, plant enough plants, and eventually, hopefully, something will grow and maybe even provide food.

For me, planting bare root fruit trees is perhaps the biggest leap of faith.  Whatever would make one believe that this dormant, sorry looking stick will ever grow to produce fruit, some 3-5 years (or more) after planting?  Still, the promise of trees laden with fruit is like a siren song, and so over the weekend I planted a jujube, a 4-in-1 Asian pear, and, out in the forest a walnut tree.

As is often the case with the fruits and vegetables I plant, I have never tasted a jujube.  I just like the idea of a prolific tree that produces fruit that, according to what I’ve read, is best left to dry on the tree.  Jujube is a serious plant, protected by robust, savage thorns, and I planted it in a hugelkultur mound I prepared over the summer in the (former) duck yard.

I have high hopes too for the 4-in-1 Asian pear – it’s a beautiful specimen (leafless and seemingly lifeless though it may be), and the graft unions are works of art on this particular tree, with four equally-sized, sturdy branches, each a different pear variety, and each firmly attached to the rootstock.

The walnut is the first nut tree I’ve ever planted, and it’s home is an area of the forest where it has ample space to grow to be 60 feet high by 60 feet wide, should it choose to do so.  Protein isn’t easy to plant, so I’m hoping that this particular tree makes it.  Almonds are next, along with Nanking cherries, perhaps sea-buckthorn, and the quince cuttings, should they reward care and optimism with roots.  Oh, and fruit.  Eventually fruit.