Gardeners rush to plant before Memorial Day

There is a frenzy going on right now as in the final shopping days before Christmas.

Everywhere you look, folks are straight out, either toting rosebushes or reaching for hanging baskets spilling with ivy geraniums or petunias, or grabbing flats of impatiens or verbena.

Memorial Day weekend is coming up, and it’s planting time Down East. The custom is: full steam ahead, through clouds of black flies – or rain, whichever. But get it planted by Memorial Day.

Every year this happens as soon as the tender fiddleheads shoot up, as soon as the leaves on the birches are the color of lime sherbet. People around here get “het up” to plant anything from window boxes to cemetery plots, and there’s no slacking off until every garden is filled and every flowerpot runneth over.

Just think about it: If there were no chance of frost in, say, late April, all of us could leisurely wander through greenhouses, chatting with happy growers as they gently separated pansies or marigolds or curly parsleys. Then, we could select a few choice plants here and there – a little red salvia or perhaps, some Dusty Miller, and in our own good time, scoop those into the ground and go onto the next spring project.

Nope, not around these parts of the country, where folks look to see when there’s a full moon, when the threat of frost has cleared. In other words, when Memorial Day weekend occurs; then, it’s usually safe to plant.

And even that is not always certain. The box on the white “bleeding heart” gave directions to plant once the ground warmed to 50 degrees, yet the temperature outside this morning was in the low 40s.

The nasturtium and cosmos seeds say on their colorful little packages: Plant after all chance of frost is over. If we waited until then to plant, the nasturtiums and cosmos would flower about time for the first frost of autumn.

So, Down Easters are chancing it. They’re scouring every nursery around for the best nonstop begonias, daisies, zinnias, petunias, and Maine’s most prolific flower – the geranium. Then, there are the buyers of perennials who are loading up on lilacs and peegee hydrangeas and the tree people who are planting everything from apricots to weeping willows.

Lines in stores and nurseries are longer than at the county fair, with customers dragging wagons or balancing trellises or wheeling carts of peat moss and fertilizer.

The patient patrons are filling their baskets with dahlia or gladiola bulbs, knowing their victory will come in late summer, long after the early bloomers have been showy – then spent.

The true gardeners planted their seeds inside weeks ago and now are ready to transplant their sweet peas or tomatoes, hot peppers or morning glories outside to harden off.

The bulk of us, though, look at the calendar and scream: Memorial Day weekend! We haven’t bought one thing and by now, the lobelia will be gone.