Easter Candy

 

Why do I find Easter candy so compelling? Lindt sheep, jelly beans, peeps, chocolates wrapped in pastel foil, Reese’s peanut butter eggs… all call to me when I enter the grocery store in early spring. Bring me home, they say, and set me on the mantle to be eaten, illicitly, after school.

I am not a big candy eater. When I was little, my mother joked that my Halloween candy lasted until Easter, tucked in the cabinet, and I preferred Fritos—crunchy, salty, corn flavored snacks that fit over my fingertips like witches hats-- to sweetness. I still do. I can dole out a good dark chocolate bar for a week, but a bag of corn chips is gone in two days (a big bag, not the single serving). Salt triumphs over sugar every time.

But Easter candy…

Maybe it’s the memories of the white chocolate rabbit tucked in my Easter Basket with the small stuffed bunny and a handful of jelly beans. I always speculated on where the Easter Bunny would hide it for days before the hunt and it was never where I thought it would be. I loved the hunt. The best spot—on a dark shelf over the cellar stairs.

Or it is the delight of eating the marshmallow and chocolate egg found tucked under a juniper bush in our back forty, a week after the massive Easter egg hunt my parents organized for the entire extended family. My father hid the candy before we left for church on Easter morning. When I asked why he was out there, he said “I’m just checking to make sure the Easter Bunny did a good job” and I believed him. With about 20 kids hunting, it was rare to miss anything, so the discovery still shines in my mind, even though the egg was past its prime.

Maybe it is the invention of the Reese’s Egg, which happened when I was 11. My father came home with one, knowing I loved the peanut butter cups. We cut it in half—they were much bigger then—to share. The next day, he had another. The day after, we began to measure the cuts, considering the egg shape in our delicate division of the piece. We debated the balance of chocolate to peanut butter and which half was best for a month. It required many trials. The jury is still out.

It’s been a very long while since I had a candy basket. My mother shifted to fruit baskets when I was in college, which I loved, and then we were done with the tradition. This year, I have purchased a bag of peanut butter eggs for Easter hunting. I will probably succumb to the lure of the foil wrapped sheep this week. I don’t need a basket…but, siren call of pastel foil still echoes in my mind.

Garden Plans

     

Every year, in January, I draw a garden plan. I work out crop rotations, so that the potatoes are in new beds. I consider arch placement for the cucumbers and squash vines. I clump my crops so that the bed will all empty out at the same time, not leaving three kale plants to lurk in a corner until April, in the way of the chicken tractor. I even plan for watering, so that I can reduce consumption by thoughtful plantings. It is a tidy, orderly, thought out plan and I love creating it. I even hang it on the fridge so that I can admire it at breakfast.

Then, Spring arrives. Beds dry out at different, unexpected rates. The chicken tractor is a couple of weeks behind schedule in its rotation. The potatoes I ordered are on Maine planting schedules, not Pacific Northwest and still have not arrived. And there The Plan goes….every year. The potato bed becomes the bed for carrots and leeks, as well as the first two rows of potatoes that I held over from last year’s harvest.  Or the peas go into the tomato bed, because there are ready to be planted and that is the sunniest spot in the yard. Or….every year, the planting plan is broken by early April.

A few months later, the second type of disruption to The Plan happens. I have extra cabbage plants, because I was over enthusiastic and unable to convince friends that they, too, needed at least three types of cabbage. Or there is one tomato that does not fit in the tomato bed. Or something did not germinate, so there is a gap, ten feet long and a foot wide, along the edge of the bed. Nature abhors a vacuum, I think, and sow something not on The Plan in the space. Some years, I think I need an extra bed to hold all of the experiments—but then I just tuck them in anywhere.

By late July, the garden is a jungle, overflowing with planned plantings, random starts, and volunteers.  In a good year, I have tracked most of the changes on the garden map, which still hangs on the fridge, notes in various colors of ink all over it. After all, we need a record of where everything was this year, so that I can create—and follow—the amazing, tidy plan next year.