Signs of spring.

Chicago.

Ah, the signs of springtime in Chicago: crocuses and daffodils in bloom; buds appearing on the trees overnight; thunderstorms rumbling through at night; and those hazard-orange signs proclaiming street cleaning. This, of course, means playing the parallel parking version of musical chairs to avoid getting a ticket. Whee!

Okay, so I'm not particularly thrilled by the half-assed appearance of spring inside the city. It's there if you look for it, but the eruption of life from winter dormancy is rather muted. Madison promises more, and the signs are all there, as well, if lagging by a day or two. The animals are active, the plants are coming back to life, and the winds are picking up.

It's time to swap the snow shovel in the car trunk for gardening implements. The Eagle Heights Community Gardens officially opened last weekend, though we couldn't be out there. Saturday evening's the tentative time for the first survey of the season, seeing how well we managed to keep the weeds down over the winter, checking to see if the perennials survived the winter. If there's enough daylight, and no serious threat of rain, we might be able to get some cool-weather crops in. It's not like there's any reason to worry about the soil being too cold. Not after this past winter.

It'll also be interesting to be out at the far edge of the gardens. The university has been reclaiming portions of the community gardens in their efforts to restore the natural prairie, and our plot's just a few steps over from the new boundary. I realize the conflict between the two sides: the gardeners want to keep their plots, to keep the community spirit going; the restoration folks want to restore the land to a natural state, to help bolster the native ecosystem, to use it as an educational resource for the community. The thing that irks me is that the university's returning the land to natural prairie by taking organic gardens and loading them with chemical fertilizers and pesticides. It just seems like a poor way of going about it.