Eastbayri.com

The birds are singing, crocus have begun to bloom, daffodils are halfway out of the ground and a few are budded. It’s not even March yet.

I know in some parts of the country February signals the official start of early-spring, but this is New England and we really ought to be under a blanket of snow. It looks for all the world like spring might arrive before we ever get a chance to complain about winter.

Not that I’m complaining about the possibility of spring coming early. Perish the thought. I just realized that I don’t feel quite ready for it yet. I never got that downtime that being well and truly snowed-in forces me to relax into. (A couple of snowy Saturdays hardly count for anything.) I had to invent excuses to make cups of hot chocolate and I didn’t get nearly as much reading done as I’d have liked. The warmish weather has kept me in a constant state of anxious agitation instead.

The other day I took advantage of that weird energy and cleaned and sharpened my tools because it occurred to me that I’ll probably be using them sooner rather than later. Tool maintenance is one of many chores that I’m apt to procrastinate doing. But after I’ve scrubbed the tub, dusted bookshelves, sorted my stacks of stuff into different stacks and finally gotten down to it, I can easily say that there’s nothing more gratifying (this time of year) than honing a grungy pair of snips back to sharp shininess.

There isn’t much to it. I use a little steel wool to gently brush off any rust or crusty sap and an inexpensive handheld diamond “stone” or file to hone the bevel of the blade. The tricky thing is, with the edge of the blade facing toward your working hand, to run the stone along the edge, sliding diagonally into the cutting edge — a direction that seems counterintuitive to me — at the exact same angle as the bevel. Five or six passes along the length of each blade (if your snips are like scissors) should do the trick.

Felco bypass pruners may be sharpened the same way (there’s only one beveled edge to worry about) or you could replace the blade to start the season fresh. Felcos are on the pricey side but because they’re made with completely replaceable parts from blade to spring to bolts, they’ll last any gardener’s lifetime as long as we don’t lose them in the compost heap. Thankfully, brilliant red handles help prevent such tragedies.

I took a walk around my garden today and was impressed (read overwhelmed) by how much I’ll have to cut back to make way for spring’s new growth. That’s what I get for not tidying up in the fall. But even though I’m suddenly feeling ambivalent about spring’s seemingly imminent arrival, it will be much easier to muster the enthusiasm to do the work now than it would have in the fall. (The only reason I can see to cut anything down in fall is to remove vole hideouts. Knock wood, those destructos haven’t discovered my garden yet.)

The first thing I’ll do, to keep me from jumping the gun and cutting perennials back too soon — some of them could still use their wintery protection just in case — is to use my newly sharpened felcos and loppers to prune the towering water sprouts off my pear tree. After that I’ll move on to cutting down the grasses, which began to self-destruct sometime in January. By the time I get around to whacking my butterfly bush (Buddleia spp.) back down to a foot off the ground, I’ll probably have forgotten I ever needed a proper winter hibernation and be as anxious for spring to finally get here as I always am.

This is Kristin Green’s 50th column for East Bay Newspapers. She’s the interpretive horticulturist at Blithewold Mansion, Gardens & Arboretum in Bristol, where she’s worked since 2003. Follow her garden blog at http://blog.blithewold.org.