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For years I have vowed to and tried unsuccessfully to write a column about why I love to garden. One quickly can mention serenity, solitude, beauty or even producing a few tasty morsels for our tables, but these always come across as trite.

What I needed was some compelling event to set me off. For those of you who are less passionate. you may replace the words "set me off" with inspire. Maybe I was waiting for some country singer to wail that you ain't lived until you've played in the dirt.

I didn't get my song but a recent article in the Wall Street Journal did the job. It came in one sentence in a lengthy article about time management. That sentence stated that if you earn more than $44,000 annually you should hire a lawn service. Your time was too valuable to do it yourself.

My argument is not with the lawn service professionals, but with the above writer. He has it exactly backwards. The more successful we are the more we need a relief valve on our time. Gardening is about time. It's about brief quieting escapes from a world that wildly spins by as we try to hang on.

In the garden, time seems to stand still. How often do a few minutes in the garden turn into hours without us even noticing?

If your budget permits, and you want several years of high maintenance, you can almost create an instant garden, but for most of us it is a much slower process. We must wait for our plants to mature. It may take a few weeks, a few months or with a large tree nearly a lifetime. Our reward is watching and waiting as the changes unfurl. Plants haven't learned that the world is in a hurry, or perhaps they are smart enough not to care.

Our gardens are our space. With your hands you can craft that space to be yours. It is something you can see, smell, touch and feel. I guess we could also add taste without too much imagination. Working the brain is wonderful, but I sense it quickly leads to stress if we never take time to enjoy our basic senses. Our well being demands a mix.

Gardening gives me the opportunity to forget about time, to establish and define my space, to escape the rat race and to keep stress from affecting my well being.

I will quickly admit there are other activities and hobbies that can bring the same results. My point is that you need something or some things to do it. Gardening is one of my some things.

To close I will quote an apple grower from New England. "Very few people feel a connection to the land, but that connection is critical to a person's sense of well being." Gardening on any scale is a way to re-establish that connection.

In the last several days I have seen a lot of yard rakes chasing leaves, twigs and other yard debris across many local landscapes. Most were in the hands of eager gardeners using the first 60-degree days to escape their winter confinement.

Questions start to fly almost as fast as the rakes. Are your peas planted? Are the pansies ready? What can I put in my permanent window boxes that will trail down over the sides?

That last question prompts my annual be patient and don't rush the spring planting season column.

I have been trying to come up with a brief bit of wisdom to serve as guidance. So here comes one of the few bits of original thinking you will ever get from me. The longer you expect the plant to stay in your yard the earlier you can plant it.

Of course there are exceptions, but if you think trees, then shrubs, then perennials and finally annuals you are on the right tract. With today's containerized plant offerings you can plant in the spring, summer or fall. Your diligence and the length of your water hose will determine your success. Spring and fall are certainly preferred but there are reasons to plant during the summer.

A couple of words about exceptions. Ornamental grasses and butterfly bushes, both vigorous in the garden, do not like to spend winters in a pot unless kept close to 40 degrees. The results of course are plants too lush for early planting.

Several days ago at a nursery about an hour north of here I saw displays of forsythia in full bloom and budded peonies at least 18 inches tall. Quite enticing for the winter weary but a recipe for quick disappointment when the next hard freeze comes. Look for plants that are no more than a week or 10 days ahead of ones already in the garden.

Back to what's out there now. If you have a few fruit trees, apples, pears, grapes and blueberries should be pruned or done soon. The rest would be happier if you waited till near or slightly after bloom time.

With annuals the old wives have tales about waiting until Mother's Day. That's almost always safe. The only problem with that is that you may think that everyone else got to the garden center before you did. The brazen start to watch the weather closely about April 20 and plant accordingly. Wisdom lies somewhere in between. Remember there is a wide range of cold tolerance among the annuals.

As we wait for spring you must think about you location. Are you in town or in the countryside? Is the spot protected or fully exposed to the wind? Are you still scraping frost from your windshield when you friends are wearing shorts? Remember you must learn your garden site for success.

One closing thought. Get your onions planted so we can get the onion snow behind us. Then we can have spring.

Perhaps now is a good time to take another shot at Bambi. Not literally, but to reexamine the problems deer cause in many of our gardens and to plot strategies to lessen their impact.

The deer's natural behavior offers us several opportunities to outsmart them. Plant selection can also be used to possibly direct the deer to a neighboring field or yard. Today we will talk mostly about the behavior and save most of the plant selection for a later article.

First, deer are creatures of habit. Unless spooked they will travel the same trails and most likely enter and exit your garden at the same spots. If we can interrupt that pattern you can get some relief.

Our options here are barricades or repellants. Before I ramble off let's make the second point. Deer are wild animals and thus are constantly on alert for danger. Their nose is their chief weapon of defense. Jam that receptor and they may look for safer hangouts. Repellants and plant selection can help here.

You have several options with barricades. Surround the venerable parts of your property with thick hedges of plants that they do not like. Another option is fencing. It takes either one very tall one or two short ones spaced so that the deer cannot land in between them.

Recently I read a claim by a gardener that he used loosely rolled hoops of loosely woven fencing wire to block them. His claim was that they would not cross for fear of entangling their feet. Don't know. Never tried it but I suspect that if that modified their behavior early in the spring it could double as a trellis for annual vines and still get season long help with the deer problem.

Repellants depend on odor. My experience of most commercial repellants is that they remind of a skunk who can change his scent. They are hardly welcome in my garden.

They work if they are renewed on a regular basis. Time and wet weather quickly reduces their effectiveness. A more tolerable repellent is human hair. I've had good success here with a faithful schedule of scattering.

There are also some pungent plants that will offer the same results on a season long basis. In another article we will tackle these and identify plants that the deer consider salad and those that they generally avoid.

When the deer are very hungry they will eat anything. Other times we have a chance to coexist. Think of it not as a war but as a series of many small battles, most of which can be won. Victories are a lot easier to obtain in the late winter and early spring. Deer feeding habits in the middle of the gardening season are tough to break.

Successful seed starting requires a fine soil mix kept moist but not wet, bottom heat and light management. Sanitation is the key. On the commercial side there are greenhouses that specialize in starting plants and others who grow the starter plants to market size.

Commercially there are soil mixes designed just for starting seeds. You may be able to find such a mix but the readily available Pro-mix will work fine. Avoid using garden soil as any part of your mix. It will be laced with disease organisms and will stay too wet.

Like most greenhouses, we will buy starter plants if we can. When we can't, or the minimum numbers are too great, we start them. Since most seeds like a little light to germinate, my wife generally puts the seeds on the top of a slightly firmed seedbed and covers them with a light layer of vermiculite.

Moisture is critical. The seed tray must not dry out but must not be too wet either. Commercially, regular automatic misting or an arrangement where the bottom of the flats are flooded in an ebb and flow pattern does this. You can get the same results by placing the seed trays in a plastic bag and misting them when necessary.

Seeds germinate best with uniform heat. This is best accomplished with bottom heating. You can use a heating mat. Commercially, in the ebb and flood setups the floor is heated. On a smaller scale the seed trays are set on a series of small tubes which circulate hot water.

We use the latter. Regardless, providing bottom heat is expensive. We devote less than two per cent of our space to seed starting but devote almost twenty per cent of our fuel dollars to that space. In other words we find it cheaper to buy started plants than to grow our own.

This specialization in the greenhouse business provides better and cheaper plants but also spawns an occasional disaster. This year a popular series of geraniums will not be available because of disease.

Those cuttings started out in Guatemala and went to rooting stations in Michigan and New Hampshire. About 90 greenhouses in Pennsylvania got infected plants before the problem was discovered.

We were lucky because our plant order had not been delivered. We just had to scurry, generally successfully, to find 3,000 replacement plants from a different breeder.

Light, as I said, encourages germination in many seeds, but is critical to grow a stocky garden ready plant after they have emerged. Grow lights work. A greenhouse works. A bright sunny window works if you turn the plants and watch the moisture.

For the home gardener, seed starting is more an act of love and self achievement than economics. With the above information and a careful reading of the seed packs success can easily be had.