By Robin Meiklejohn

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Lady Spring, is it true you have more beauty than I will ever see or more beauty than will ever be? I lost you a year past and pray you will return at last. Your return is long awaited and endured. Your entrance with winds and deep snows, although brief, mind me of the grief I have for your fleeting stay, and your hesitance to grant me a return. The horrors you visit on our citizens in southern corridors make me think you are no lady at all, but a hooligan.
"I was listening to the Bolero, reading Mark Twain. There was a hole into heaven sucking in the souls. I was listening to Coltrane, reading Bob Dylan. There was a hole into hell, leaking out the devils."*
Spring, you are no lady, yet one I will never stop looking for and welcome with open arms, though I know your stay will be fleeting and not often kind. With a deep sigh of resignation, I relent. Lady Spring will return at her will. It is much like "the watched pot never boils." If you are a cook, you can not help but look. If you are a gardener, it is pretty much the same thing — c'mon!
So I wanted to know how some local folks can and do defy odds of the growing season around here. I had a conversation with a friend the other day to find out exactly that.
Heidi and Terry Comstock live on the north end of Log Hill, near Colona. Terry came home one day and presented Heidi a gift of a 30 x 80 feet commercial greenhouse procured by being in the right place and time on a job as a master carpenter/supervisor in Telluride. Heidi thought of a small adjunct to their outdoor gardens, something to grow herbs in over the winters. Her apoplectic response was, "I was not thinking a career change." She had a full time job. However, in years past she worked at the Denver Botanical Gardens. Terry was a master carpenter par non, and together they erected the monster and what was originally a plan for more personal food production evolved into a mission (with a small "m"). Gratitude Gardens & Greenhouse came to be; not a commercial operation, but indeed a supplement to outdoor gardens. Surplus herbs have been sold to restaurants in Ridgway and Telluride. Trades have been made with neighbors and friends. Heidi's inclination toward education has provided opportunities when tours, by appointment only, have come through. Best yet is that were there some emergency, they could provide five families with food needs. She is learning — beyond a voracious, book-learning appetite — the art of keen-eyed sensing of what plants do in concert with climatic conditions, seasonal insect interactions, even what the soil is saying.
In the last several years, over the winter, with minimal propane heat when it drops below 43 degrees — a subsoil, flexible, perforated PVC piping recycles solar heat from high above through the beds — an amazing number of vegetables have proliferated. Tomatoes, peppers and basil work through mid-January. Cucumbers and melons give up the ghost a bit sooner. But every imaginable leafy green and many herbs carry on. Root and cruciferous crops of astonishing varieties thrive. Sugar snap peas, strawberries and nasturtiums provide surprise and crunch during times of snow, mud and mush. Heidi boasts a four-year-old kale plant and an eight foot Japanese mustard with a two inch diameter stalk. When plants look bedraggled, she nurses them along, when vanity would suggest pulling and composting. She always lets a few go to seed then saves the non-GMO's for next years' replanting.
For us, we are trying to accept that getting into our outdoor garden, with all the prep required, will have to wait until Lady Spring deigns to arrive. Living in an extreme cold sink, without a greenhouse, our ambitions are more modest.
Growing anything is worthy of celebration, although knowing that some can and do harvest throughout our interminable winters is heartening and humbling.
* Extracted with personal discretion from a "Michael On Fire" song, "Cadillac Beach" from the album "The Artist The Dreamer The Lover The Fool."