I take a walk with my dogs at 8 o’clock in the morning. The birds have been up for hours and they are busy. Morning birdsong is the music of spring. The woodpeckers stayed all winter, but they’re noisier now — calling, swooping through the air, not just pecking at the trees above my head.

They are joined by the red-winged blackbirds that have returned to nest in my meadow, and the robins that jump between the sumac branches. My three chickens scratch among the brush, making their comforting chortling sounds to each other, not bothered by the occasional squawk of the ring-necked pheasant wandering nearby.

The dogs pull ahead to my neighbor’s pond. I peer through my tree line at ducks on the water as the dogs sniff some deer tracks. We amble back toward the house and stop to check on my tiny spruce. I bought 50 seedlings from the state Department of Environmental Conservation’s Saratoga nursery more than two years ago. By this time, the planting directions said, the trees should be two feet tall. The little one in front of me is green and strong, but only 8 inches high. Its fellow seedling a few paces away was buried last fall by an over-zealous highway plowman who plowed the non-existent shoulder — my property — instead of our country road. I intend to dig out the wee tree to see if it’s still alive, but the dogs pull me onward.

We round the drive and head to the field, where I planted 40 other seedlings. We pass the Charlie Brown Christmas tree, as the children call it, that I stuck near the maples lining the driveway. I meant to take down one maple before it could take down our roof, but, when it bloomed so well last spring, I took pity on it and left it standing. The little spruce under it gets enough light, and was the healthiest of the bunch that first year, but it is scraggly now. Two full feet tall, but scraggly.

The chickens see me and run to get any scraps I might throw them, but they see the dogs and change direction mid-step. We continue to the field, and I examine my seedlings. Spring is the time to see what survived the winter, and what didn’t.

Disappointment! My healthiest seedlings on the property line stood well for two years, but two are now dead — one chomped off by a hungry deer, and one simply orange and gone.

I glance at my mini-nursery in rows across the field and see a few trees that made it. My darling son may have mowed a couple last year, and the rocky ground may have killed more. If I took time to count, I might have 40 percent of the trees still growing. Well, that’s 40 percent more than I had three years ago, when I put them in on a whim.

What a whim! In the Midwest, where I spent part of my childhood, you can scrape the rich soil with your hands and plant anything at any depth. And, the flowers and vegetables grow! How they grow! In West Texas, where I grew up, what soil there was was sandy, and easy to move with a child’s small hand.

These 50 tree plugs took more than a week and a strong shovel to dig into our rocky, clay ground. My father, in the Midwest, suggested that I walk along in a rhythm, first creating an easy hole with a shovel, then plopping a plug in, and, finally, tamping the soil down with my foot before moving on, as he had done so many years ago when he did the same. It was hard work for him then, too, but it was the work of a day.

The year I planted my spruces, I watched a neighbor with an expensive toy — a tractor with all the attachments — dig five holes with an auger to plant a row of rose of Sharon bushes. An auger! I chuckled a bit thinking of the overkill of using an auger for a little bush.

The auger, of course, as it goes with farm equipment, didn’t work the first time and had to be repaired, adjusted, realigned. The work took days. But, by the time I’d dug through enough rock to plant 20 baby trees, achieving no rhythm at all, I was thinking that my neighbor’s “overkill” had saved him a few days of sore muscles.   

The dogs follow the trail, crossing from the field over the creek on the bridge into our backyard. We stop to inspect the new strawberry plants in my kindergartener’s flower garden. Each year, she plants Mammoth Russian sunflowers, giant zinnias, and a handful of other, shorter flowers in a circle where her baby pool once stood.

The little garden makes mowing the yard more cumbersome, but its beauty outweighs its burden. Her flowers are mixed; she has spring, summer, and fall flowers that provide us with months of happiness when we glance out the living room window.

The dogs and I head back to the house, passing my sole gardening foray for the spring — pansies in a red pot. In the last few years, the rabbits and the deer have worn me down, and my interest in planting a salad bar for them has waned.

The free-ranging chickens have beaten me, too. They usually get to any vining vegetable before I do; last year, to save our pumpkins, we plopped them into flower pots and they grew into the shapes of the containers, unmolested by the hens. There are no vines today. Tulip leaves poke through the ground where the pumpkins grew last year, just off the front deck.

The dogs are tired. The birds are quieter now, and the sun is warming the air. Spring is welcome.