You may not be aware, but there is a keen competition underway at this time of the spring that your usual media outlets have likely ignored.  Of course, I'm referring to the annual Fool's Gambit - the race to plant a garden!  This is the struggle to be the first in your township to get your garden in, no matter what the experts say (because you know better, right?).  You watch the sky like a sailor, looking for clues to next week's weather.  You create shelters from pop bottles and plastic and 1x2s to protect the tender seedlings from the elements.  You coax the seeds from the soil, spending hours hunched over recently-planted rows, pleading with the goddesses of unreasonably-early fertility.  You are engaging in ritual dances to assuage the frost spirits.  And of course, you end up replanting whole sections three weeks later...!  Oh, and it can be called a Fool's Gambit, because by the end of June all of the plants in all the gardens are at about the same state of maturation, no matter when they were planted.  Though that doesn't keep me from engaging in the race every year!

For a respite from this stress, this week we have the last of the series on Celtic Spring here on Routes & Branches & Beyond.  We have songs and tunes about wing commanders, peculiar ferrets, green bushes, shoals, skylarks, merry sisters, hash (not the expensive kind), false young men, good beer, speedy ploughs and a mess of feathers.  From bands such as Nomos, Nightingale, Siobhan Miller, Ceolbeg, Kenneth & Angus MacKenzie, Mackeel, Dallahan, Malinky, Lúnasa, Allison Lupton, Donal Lunny, Matt Molloy & Paul Brady & Tommy Peoples, and Aiden Coffey et al.  Put down that packet of seeds and join me.

Routes & Branches & Beyond show #322 2024 04 18

Ivan Emke