Gardeners Lose It, (Hilariously!) And Shake Off A Reluctant Spring

Gardener's Supply employees try
desperately to shake off winter.

Astronomical spring arrives here in Vermont today, but you'd never know it.

There's still snow on the ground. After a wintry start this morning with temperatures in the single digits, readings are forecast to barely make it above freezing this afternoon.

It's supposed to snow tomorrow, the first full day of spring.
 
Many of us are not happy about this. Especially gardeners. This is a post about how the lack of spring can drive people a bit batty, but in a really hilarious fashion.

And I do mean fashion. Unique fashion.

I work at a company called Gardener's Supply, a Burlington based, employee-owned company, which, as the name implies, sells all the stuff you need to get your garden going and thriving.

The job is a great gig, especially for a guy like me, who likes to dig around in garden dirt and see what he can come up with.

Pretty much everyone else who works at Gardener's Supply is a gardener too, so there's a very palpable level of frustration at the office and the retail stores about how this spring just isn't doing it so far.

Yeah, we're going a little crazy.

Which might explain the video you'll definitely want to watch at the bottom of this post. It's a reworked version of Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" that Taylor surely never thought she'd see.

But, gardeners can be inventive, so there you go.

The colorful tutu like things everybody in the video is wearing over their white long johns are called  Tub Trugs. Most people use them as handy, durable buckets for hauling veggies in from the garden, a place to put weeds as your pulling them, or for storing just about anything.

I have a few Tub Trugs. A couple are for the garden.  I use one of them as a laundry basket.  A customer I talked with ordered six Tub Trugs from me, because she said her goats like to play with them. So yeah, at the risk of sounding like I'm from the Shameless Commerce Division, you can use Tub Trugs for anything.

However, I was never imaginative enough to envision cutting out the bottoms of tub trugs and using them as mini skirts of sorts for a music video.  Gotta hand it to the creative department at Gardener's Supply, I tell ya.

The fashion world is fickle, though, so I don't know if we'll see on Project Runway the white long underwear, the Tub Trug tutus and the colorful gardener wellie boots the people in the video are wearing.

But you never know.

The Tub Trug tutus are fun, but I admit I'm relieved to learn that they won't become part of the Gardener's Supply Official Employee Dress Code.

The video is something else, but it is a good way to shake off the nervous energy of waiting, and waiting and WAITING for spring.

Eventually, spring will arrive, and we'll all get a bit less crazy. We'll go back to using Tub Trugs for hauling all of our planting tools out to the garden, instead of wearing them as strange fashion statements.

The video seems to have struck a chord among the legions of winter weary, based on the long list of positive comments on Facebook and the general reaction to this.

The video is a nice goofy break from the winter cold, and maybe it's some sort of dance to the weather gods or something that would beseech them to bring on spring.  And quickly.

You be the judge. Here's the video: