Believe it or not, there are other things in my life besides revising The Tale of the Drakanox. One of them is my garden. As the days slowly get longer, I can look forward to my favorite season truly unfolding.
I already have a rough sketch of what I want to plant and where. Initially I wanted to add food to the table, and I grew all the vegetables I could. However, I noted that my husband, who does the cooking, would ignore my beautiful vegies and buy ones from the store. That’s a bit discouraging, so I’ve been switching over to more flowers.
I’m also re-orienting our total landscape toward native plants. The eventual goal is to replace our lawn and avoid a lot of the work involved. I’m also interested in microfauna (insects) and want to provide food sources for them. I do stuff like sunflower counts, where you set a timer and watch a sunflower, keeping track of what insects visit. Part of my spring routines is to look back at who visited, research their needs, and try to add a few things that will help them thrive.
My big thing I probably need to do is take apart my native bee houses and give them a good cleaning. That way the parasites don’t overwhelm them. Not my favorite chore, but it needs to be done!
If you’ve read Dancer in the Grove of Ghosts, you might remember Tisha describing a spring ritual where her family danced in their orchard and sang a song to call the earth worms out of hibernation. I won’t go that far, for fear of alarming the neighbors, but it’s a small part of my life that feeds directly into my fiction.
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Wyrmflight 
I’m fine with local plants growing here–except the one I’m highly allergic to! (OK, and I also cut out the cat’s claw and mesquite, both of which cut me.)
As for lawns, I remember a Christian televangelist saying that it’s wrong to get a new car if you aren’t keeping up your lawns. He made keeping a lawn a religious principle.
First, lawns are not even mentioned in the Bible (apparently back then the concept of lawn didn’t even exist). Second, lawns were started in western society by rich people to show off their wealth because grass had to be cut by servants by hand (lawnmowers hadn’t been invented). Third, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more land in America is used for lawns to look at than for crops to feed people.
I sent the televangelist a “helpful” letter about it, but not surprisingly never heard back.
As for Tisha, a person similar to Tisha that I know in real life almost certainly will be dancing outside to welcome spring, and so will others. But that’s in a place where the nearest neighbors are pretty far away….
That’s some intensive gardening. Good luck with your insect counts. If nothing else it’s interesting.
The hope is that once the transition is made, it will be less intensive.