April is the cruelest month.

At least, it has been this year if you’re an avid gardener here in scenic PA. A week of high temperatures near 90 just as your bulbs and bleeding hearts are flowering, so you watch with sinking heart, knowing their bloom display will be significantly foreshortened by the heat. Preceded and followed by endless nights with lows hitting 33, causing you to rush to close all the windows in the greenhouse (no easy feat, since four are at ground level behind a thicket of plants, and four are about 12 feet off the ground), turn the heater back on (again), and cry over the resulting electric bill.

Not to mention that, on those days when the weather is actually mild and pleasant, with highs in the low 70s and lows in the mid-50s, you’re dying to get out there and jump-start the gardening season. The fruit trees and blueberries are in bloom, the snap peas, salad greens, and various alliums and herbs are growing. You haul out your potted tomatoes and peppers so they can start the hardening-off process that precedes their final journey into the garden beds. Your hands itch to drag a hundred plants out of the greenhouse, pot up those that need it, and arrange them decoratively on the deck. You’re dying to set out a container of blue-flowered nemisias and primrose-yellow violas to make a splash on an outdoor table. You almost can’t refrain from hanging all your hanging baskets under the trees. You’re in an agony of eagerness to put the goldfish and water plants in your outdoor container water gardens.

Then you see that another night of 33-degree temperatures is expected. You shut up the greenhouse, turn on the heater, drag the containers of tomatoes and peppers back inside. (Again.) You pray that the oregano, thymes, sage, Russian kale, and Swiss chard you just planted are tough enough to stand the chill. You order still more fruit and spice plants online to stave off frustration, a syndrome peculiar to gardeners, much like some people tending to overeat when they’re depressed or bored.

Our friend Ben understands that the hottest social networking site on the internet these days is called ChatRoulette, where you may not pay your money, but you certainly take your chances. For gardeners like me, I think April is more like PlantRoulette: Bring it out, take it in. Plant it out, keep it in. Turn it off, turn it on. Buy it now, wait a while. Aaaarrgghhh!!!!

Any good gardening guru will tell you not to get too excited about outdoor gardening before your last predicted spring frost date, roughly May 1st to May 10th here in our Zone 6 garden. But on those blissful, sunny, warm days of April, with swathes of bloom all around you, bees buzzing and birds singing, it’s awfully hard to wait.

You’ve probably heard “April is the cruelest month,” but do you know where it’s from? T.S. Eliot began his monumental poem, The Waste Land, with these lines: 

“April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.”

Our friend Ben thinks we gardeners can relate.