On Sunday, Feb. 15, as the wind howled and whipped snow around the yard, I started my garden down in the greenhouse that stretches across the front of our house. This greenhouse/sunroom, which we added many years ago, was my childhood dream. An incorrigible doodler, I sat through most of grade school surreptitiously drawing intricate floor plans of my future house. My favorite included an open-air courtyard surrounded by the rooms of the house with lush jungle-y plants growing, birds in cages, and of course, a fountain. The idea came from a picture book about a girl who lived in Spain.

Half of the space is our dining room; the other half, three steps down, is the indoor garden of my childish dreams, the actual earth underfoot. Luckily, cold air sinks, so on the whole, the sunshine we get offsets the chilly floor. At least, that’s what I tell myself. It’s all worth the chance to dig in the dirt, and plant those first seeds. Yesterday it was the onions, coal black little crumb-like seeds; I held a year’s worth of the onions we’ll eat in the palm of my hand.

Starting them in February, indoors, in three neat rows in long window boxes, is none too soon. They grow slowly in the cool windows, as each day the sun steadily climbs higher and higher behind the tall pines of Frohock Mountain. (One of the big surprises when we bought this house, after the discovery that the barn sills had rotted away, was that it’s on the north side of a small, heavily forested mountain.

In midwinter the sun rises above the trees from about 10 a.m. to noon, leaving the house in shade the rest of the day. Seedlings require better light, so I rig long shop lights a few inches above them, and a soil-heating cable under them, and a plastic tent over the whole thing, to discourage the cat from using the tempting trays of dirt for her own purposes. Oh, and a series of mouse traps to cut down on the predators that love to snip off the fresh greens of my future garden.

 We’ve occasionally had a weasel move in for the winter, as well as the more mundane mice and shrews. An influx of flying squirrels a couple of years ago proved to be an anomaly, probably some uptick in the local f.s. population.

They turned up on the kitchen counter, in the bathtub and the upstairs linen closet. Turns out they love caramels, and left us only a plastic bag full of wrappers. If it should happen to you, you’ll know them by their enormous eyes.

The greenhouse was, for a time, an actual screened-in aviary with birds living free. We had finches, lovebirds and parakeets out there, and even a myna bird for a while. One parakeet chewed a hole in the wall and disappeared inside. A while later she came out with four baby parakeets! The next time she went in to nest she never came out; we suspected one of the wall critters got her. An old house often comes with colonies of chewing, scrabbling – what? Mice? Red squirrels? Rats? A snake? It seems best not to look too closely. They don’t bother us, and we don’t bother them.

The days of an indoor aviary came to an end when we realized all those hookbills were chewing apart the woodwork. Also, the finches were nesting in the hanging pots of spider plants. The dream garden was getting destroyed. Now our birds — a cockatiel and a Senegal parrot — live in cages overlooking the indoor garden.

The cockatiel came to us one December day when Lynn Hutchings spotted it perched on one of Mike’s lobster traps in their front yard. It was a freezing cold day, and Cocky (as we later cleverly named him) willingly hopped onto Lynn’s finger. She called me to see if I’d heard of any lost bird reports; I hadn’t, but offered to take it while we tried to track down its owner. (Along with a whole lot of other random stuff, we’ve got about half a dozen bird cages in our barn, so I’m an easy mark.)

For several weeks I wrote about Cocky in my Camden Herald column, hoping to find his owner. As far as I know, nobody ever reported a missing cockatiel. I’m convinced somebody let him go that cold day; he can be annoyingly noisy, imitating the smoke alarm incessantly. He couldn’t have flown far and survived.

The Senegal parrot, a small, green and yellow bird about the same size as Cocky, once belonged to my friend, Betty Lord. They were moving and didn’t have room for him and his large cage, so she asked if I’d take him. He came complete with name — P.J. — and a friendly disposition. Not so Cocky, who after that first day when he stepped onto Lynn’s finger, has never allowed anybody to touch him.

In a few days, the onions will begin to poke through the soil, little upside-down “U-s”, hunching up and then unfurling their pointy tips. They look like rows of new grass, fragile and thin; every couple of weeks I’ll give them a haircut, snipping the top two to three inches with a scissors (and putting them in an omelet — very tasty). By this trimming they develop thicker stems.

I also water them every couple of weeks with a weak solution of Miracle Grow. (In my mind, we garden strictly organically, except for this one thing. Seedlings do so much better with a shot of it. After all, consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. If anyone can suggest an organic substitute, I’d be willing to consider it!

 So now, in my mind’s eye, it’s early May 2014. I have a couple of window boxes heavy with dark green, chunky scallion-sized plants – Copra yellow storage onions and Rossa di Milano red onions. I’ve deeply dug the 25-foot long bed, loosening the soil with my favorite tool, the broadfork that I got from Johnny’s Seeds many years ago, then spread buckets of compost from the pile behind the barn on the top. The soil looks good enough to eat, or at least, to plunge your hands into.

      And that’s what we do. Four-year-old Andy is with me that day and eager to help. I drive the old dibble stick (the one I got from Bill Brooks, builder of the Duck Trap Motel, a New Jersey transplant himself who took to Lincolnville like a native) deep into that soil, making holes on a 6-inch grid.

I pry out a handful of seedlings, along with the warm soil and roots, gently tease them apart and hand them, one at a time, to the little boy, showing him how to twirl the roots into the hole, then fill it back with the compost top layer. He catches on quickly, but it’s all I can do to keep them coming, so struck am I by the wonder of this little grandson, just beginning to grow back his own head of hair, only now healthy enough to sit on the damp ground and get dirt under his fingernails like any other four-year-old in town.

You may not have an indoor garden that imitates a Spanish courtyard, but everyone can grow micro greens, the jazzed up version of the sprouts we all used to raise on the sink windowsill. Watch the video, then go find  the box of leftover seeds from last year. You probably have lettuce and herbs and spinach and radishes and so forth. They’ll make delicious micro greens!

There will be two Ash Wednesday services at United Christian Church, Feb. 18, one at noon and the other at 6 p.m.

This month’s Winter Presentation & Concert at the Lincolnville Library will feature 10-year-old Maine author Lydia Schofield (pseudonym JoJo Thoreau) talking about her newly-published first (!) book Wendy Bendy. You may have read about her in the Bangor Daily News.

Written “in the vein of Dr. Seuss and Mother Goose, it is an illustrated tale about a little gymnast at the top of her game until she hurts her back, and has to survive two bothersome brothers.”

And following will be “The Pinwheel Brothers play a combination of Americana and original jaunty upbeat string music. The band formed after many shared open-mic and fiddle group jams. For the past three years they have been singing and playing throughout Waldo Wounty. You might have seen them at the Common Ground Fair or on WABI news from the American Folk Festival in Bangor.” Contact Rosey Gerry roskari@gmail.com, 975-5432 to reserve seats, $10 each and benefits the Library.

Rev. Kate Braestrup, Chaplain to the Maine Warden Service, will be preaching this week (last week’s service was cancelled), 9:30 a.m. at United Christian Church.

The Lynx is the Lincolnville Central School’s weekly newsletter. Parents often refer to it for news of upcoming events, but anyone can look at it. An article in the latest issue, The Five Hidden Benefits of Reading to Your Children, should be of general interest, especially if you’ve got little ones, too young for school.

Congratulations to seven sixth graders chosen for the Sixth Grade District III Honors Music Festival to be held March 6 at Gardiner Middle School: Kevin Bergelin, Madison Boetsch, Rosa LaChance, Abigail Hammond, Owen Markowitz, Rose O’Brien and Alley Johnson.

Chris Burstein, our newly-elected representative to the State Legislature writes: “Now that the 127th Legislature is underway, I will be sending out periodic updates on my work as your state representative.  If you would like to be removed from the list, just let me know by responding to this email.  If you are interested in receiving Legislative updates, please email me so I can add them to my list. Thank you for the opportunity to serve you!

Representative Christine S Burstein, RN, MSN, FNP  District 96  (Belmont, Liberty, Lincolnville, Montville, Morrill, Palermo, Searsmont) Joint committee on Health and Human Services  Please note-   Any information included in Legislative emails may be subject to The Freedom of Access Act.  Any information that you deem personal should not be included in emails.”

I’ve got to mention ice dams, those leaks that develop where two rooflines meet. We had a nasty one over our above-mentioned sunroom/greenhouse last week, and solved it by shoveling off the roof. Well, actually, one of our sons shoveled off the roof, another good argument for having kids. But here’s a solution that came from a local woman via the Lincolnville Bulletin Board last week: “As a temporary fix, we have used a leg from panty hose filled with salt (the kind you put on your walkway). Tie off each end. Throw it across the ice dam with part of the stocking hanging over the edge. This starts melting the ice dam and leaves a channel for the water to flow.  We have to make several today ourselves.”     

Lincolnville Resources

Town Office: 493 Hope Road, 763-3555

Lincolnville Fire Department: 470 Camden Road, non-emergency 542-8585, 763-3898, 763-3320

Fire Permits: 763-4001 or 789-5999

Lincolnville Community Library: 208 Main Street, 763-4343

Lincolnville Historical Society: LHS, 33 Beach Road, 789-5445

Lincolnville Central School: LCS, 523 Hope Road, 763-3366

Lincolnville Boat Club, 207 Main Street, 975-4916

Bayshore Baptist Church, 2636 Atlantic Highway, 789-5859, 9:30 Sunday School, 11 Worship

Crossroads Community Baptist Church, meets at LCS, 763-3551, 11:00 Worship

United Christian Church, 763-4526, 18 Searsmont Road, 9:30 Worship

Contact person to rent for private occasions:

Community Building: 18 Searsmont Road, Diane O’Brien, 789-5987

Lincolnville Improvement Association: LIA, 33 Beach Road, Bob Plausse, 789-5811

Tranquility Grange: 2171 Belfast Road, Rosemary Winslow, 763-3343