I've resorted to an anti-winter weapon, time-tested in Saskatchewan, to survive Toronto's snowiest winter in years and make it to April.
Growing up, when the snowbanks lining the drive to our wooded yard reached the crossbars of the power poles, my family would hunker down to scheme and plot with ... seed catalogues.
The glossy packages of garden porn would start to show up in our village mailbox in late February and early March - just as the howling storms took a last swipe at our farm.
In those days, there was no expectation of taking a midwinter break in warmer climes. There were animals to tend. Instead, between dawn and dusk chores, we'd read and dream with the likes of McFayden Seeds Co., offering uncompromising quality since 1910.
Two things we were never short of were dreams and dirt. With a bit of effort, you could grow almost anything in that black, fertile prairie earth. Arugula, endive and radicchio; our family consumed designer greens long before they became trendy.
And we eagerly tried innovations the seed catalogues offered to ship in bare-root form: thornless raspberries, painless pickings to freeze for the Christmas trifle; a cold-hardy variety of asparagus, perfect next to the Sunday roast beef along with elephant garlic.
In 1967, I convinced my father I just had to have a flower garden in the shape of Canada's centennial symbol. Being an indulgent parent of limited means, he helped me agonize over the seed catalogues, make my selections and mail the order to faraway Brandon, Man. Then he tilled the ground and built a centennial frame from bits of recycled lumber.
When the seeds arrived, he left me to happily muck in and plant. I had dreamt of 11 perfect triangles of blooms in the stylized shape of a maple leaf. Unfortunately, a spring frost touched my project, giving it a gap-toothed effect.
Dad was consoling. "No matter. We'll try again next year."
And with his quiet farmer's optimism, he showed me that gardening is a process, that no effort is truly lost and that one must hold on to the promise of next year.
I've started three gardens from scratch since learning the lesson of those empty triangles. They weren't failures, but an opportunity to try again.
When my spouse's job took us to the island of Cyprus and he travelled the Middle East, I battled loneliness with The Mediterranean Gardener by Hugo Latymer as my guide to the hot-dry garden.
There the soil was terracotta-coloured and water was rationed for most of the year. But the kitchen sink was progressively equipped to catch used dishwater in a pail below, so I was able to nurse two insignificant sticks of bougainvillea into a wall of cherry-coloured delight within the space of a year. I spoke little Greek, and the greenhouse owner in our village outside of Nicosia spoke no English, but it didn't matter. She pointed; I planted.
My former neighbours report that my lemon tree is still standing. (There is nothing quite like telling your visitors to go pick a lemon for afternoon tea.) And they say each spring a magenta swath of open-faced African daisies still rises up along the sweeping stone driveway.
Returning to Calgary, I tackled a new yard that backed onto a golf course with a view of the Rockies. It proved to be my hardest garden venue. If the deer weren't eating the most prickly of bush roses, or the voles and other varmints weren't sucking new seedlings underground, it was the weather. One memorable day, visitors came from Michigan. In the space of time it took to serve cocktails and hors d'oeuvres, a hail storm rolled in and flattened my garden. (Time for another cocktail.)
Even without the punishing hail, neighbours would walk by my front beds and shake their heads over my forlorn rhododendrons - more suited to a warmer B.C. growing zone. Ultimately, my garden plan proved too ambitious for a mother of two young children. The nicest thing a neighbour ever did for me was to come unbidden to weed while I nursed the newest baby.
In contrast, gardening in Ontario is so easy, it's almost magical. Huck the seeds in the ground, water and harvest. It's amazing how much bounty a suburban lot can produce. The dilemma is limiting what to choose from the seed catalogues: hyacinth beans that bloom pink; six-foot-tall Russian sunflowers with heads as big as plates; sweet million cherry tomatoes that really live up to their name.
And then there are the freebies - for three straight years a border of white alyssum has obligingly reseeded itself. That's a next-year story my dad would have appreciated.
Now, when the black triangles appear in my backyard borders, I don't curse. I see it as an opportunity to dig out the much-loved seed catalogues and search for the next experiment.
Christine Mushka is a Globe and Mail copy editor who lives in Ajax.