Sunday, March 20, 2011
Friday, March 18, 2011
Life-Bombs
This spring four Oberlin College Environmental Studies students will be working with me on my garden and learning farming skills and sustainable agriculture concepts along the way. Last week they came for our first session to begin at the beginning: seeds.
As limpid late winter sunlight streamed into my dining room, we dampened seed-sowing mix and tamped it into seed trays. We talked about the peat bogs that had been mined to bring us this most amenable medium. Peat moss is the accumulated work of thousands of years of dilligent living by sphagnum moss. Leaves composed of a single layer of cells unfurl continuously upward while older ones die off below but continue to serve by wicking water up to those green blades above. Where do living and dying meet in this intimate mini-world? Over years, decades, centuries of living, the moss' dying remains create an environment so acidic as to prevent any organisms from entering to engage in the normal business of decay. Ultimately, deep bogs coated in shimmering green are formed. In World War I when bandages ran short, it was the silent work of centuries by moss that came to the rescue, with fluffy antiseptic peat moss used to stanch wounds. One death warding off another. In ancient Ireland, a peat bog was the final resting place for a sacrificial victim whose luck it was to find this antiseptic home. One death preserving another. This is where your potting soil comes from. One death nurturing new life.
Peat bogs are however, like oil, a finite resource and the work of millenia is being consumed too quickly. Coir, or the hairy husk of coconuts that are a normally trashed byproduct of the coconut industry, has also recently come into use as an alternative to peat moss. While the recycling aspect of coir as potting mix is laudable, is replacing one endangered resource with another non-local resource the best option? In many English gardening books, seed-starting mediums are usually described as "composts," designated in their fineness by numbers. While this may simply refer to peat moss mixes, it points back in gardening history to the original solution of sifting compost. Compost would be "riddled" through screens of varying gauges for a determined fineness. Though I admit I am using commercial peat-moss-based mix this year for my seedlings, perhaps investing some time in sifting some of my own compost for future seedlings is the most local sustainable way of beginning the season.
Our trays formed, we sat down with seeds: brassicas and lettuce, zinnias and pansies. As we made shallow furrows (no more than twice deep as the size of the seed) in our trays, I explained that seeds are life-bombs and water is the fuse. In dicot seeds, a tiny proto root and leaves are nestled inside of two larger cotyledons or food storage organs and all of this is surrounded by a seed coat. As soon as water penetrates the seed coat, enzymatic processes surge and the cotyledons swell, rupturing the seed coat as the root burrows into the soil. A tiny cluster of stem cells (called meristematic cells) at the tip of the root divide rapidly forming a root cap like a drill tip on the outer surface and vascular cells in the interior that lengthen and push with tremendous force capable of rupturing stone. Just behind this tip the root forms cells on its outer surface that extend in ultra-fine filaments or hairs into the soil to absorb water. The fine fuzz on the soil surface as seeds burst upward are individual cells sipping moisture. As the root burrows down, the cotyledons unfold like hands revealing the tiniest of leaves within and another packet of meristematic cells that will produce all above-ground parts of the plant. Like rocket boosters taking a satellite into orbit, the cotyledons are the only source of energy for the dramatic growth of seedlings until the leaves unfurl like solar panels to begin photosynthesizing.
To call seeds bombs, roots drills, and leaves solar panels is not too metaphoric. The power of seeds' explosive growth in their early stages of germination can alter the landscape, however minute that terrain might be. Some seeds are more powerful than others, and an old gardener's trick takes advantage of this by planting radishes and parsnip seeds together. Radishes are among the quickest harvests, and an especially satisfying first gardening experiment for young children who need instant gratification. From seeding to crunchy spicy treat, radishes take about a month. Parsnips on the other hand are incredibly slow, both in germination and in ultimate harvest. By planting parsnip seeds alongside radishes, the gardener takes advantage of the radishes' explosive growth to break open the soil so that the comparatively more gentle parsnip can easily reach the sunlight.
Plants with tap roots are particularly useful as natural drills in the dense clay soils that we have here around Oberlin. Their main root burrows deep in the ground, not only bringing up deep soil nutrients to the surface through their leaves, but fracturing and aerating the soil. Some gardeners plant daikon radishes in their fields and then deliberately leave them there unharvested to rot through the winter. Each root is like a garden fork and fertilizer in one, breaking up the soil and then decomposing into rich humus by spring.
Finally, leaves truly are solar panels in their ability to convert the energy of the sun into chemical energies stored in sugars and starches. They power all life on the planet. As Michael Pollan wrote in his important letter to then-President-Elect Obama entitled "Farmer in Chief," we can solve many of our national problems by coming to terms with the reality of our "solar economy." Life truly does revolve around the sun and it is leaves that harness its power.
I am writing about seeds as bombs, roots as drills, and leaves as solar panels, but this is merely reverse-engineering language and by extension the world. We would do better to discuss bombs as seeds, drills as roots, and solar panels as leaves. How would our thinking and our actions shift if we set these plant parts as the ground for our human language?
Having sowed our seeds, the students and I looked at some trays I had seeded two weeks before: kale and calendula. Cotyledons were unfurled and the first leaves were developing. We "pricked out" the seedlings, that is, transplanted them from their cramped seed trays into more commodious flats, 72 plants to a flat. This is my favorite plant propagation task. There is a meditative quality to the delicacy of the maneuvers that I first learned to appreciate during my training days at Stonecrop Gardens, where myself and the other interns spent many early spring hours in the potting shed at this work.
When pricking out, one should always remember that roots and root hairs are incredibly delicate and that while there are usually two cotyledons and more than one leaf, there is only ever one stem on a seedling, so one should never grab a seedling by its stem lest it get crushed. Chopstick in one hand nudging roots apart from each other, and the fingers of the other hand delicately holding a cotyledon, we teased apart our seedlings. After making a hole in the mix for the new seedling, it is best to submerge it as deeply as possible in the cell, up to but never above the level of the cotyledons. Burying the stem might seem counter-intuitive, but it helps to anchor the new plant. After gently nudging soil mix over the roots it's on to the next seedling. When a whole flat is planted up, it's time to bottom-soak it. Bottom-soaking is preferable to watering from above because it is more gentle and the water acts as a million tiny hands reaching up through each soil particle to remove air gaps and to ensure that the delicate roots come into contact with the soil mix.
As we worked our way through our kale and calendula seedlings, we talked about environmental studies and I asked the students, "What do you need for a local food economy?" Renewable energy, infrastructure, compost, transportation. "What else?" I asked. After lots of good ideas, I shared my own: people who know how to grow food. Going from seed to seedling to plant to harvest is hardly a simple process and it is a knowledge-set that can only truly be acquired through experience. If we are going to create the web of relationships required to live locally, many more of us will have to be involved in food-growing. These four students began taking their first steps toward the knowledge and experience of how to do that.
For me the ideal would be that everyone grow at least some of their food. Even if only growing a small pot of lettuce greens on a windowsill in Brooklyn or the Upper West Side (or an edible fern like Ostrich Fern, Matteucia struthiopteris, for those in shadier apartments?), the act of eating a leaf or a fruit or a frond of something you have grown and lived with begins the road to the solar economy. These plants in the backyard or on the windowsill are our own solar power plants, or better yet we should flip that metaphor around and begin seeing solar power plants as leaf mirror gardens in the desert.
Ground
As limpid late winter sunlight streamed into my dining room, we dampened seed-sowing mix and tamped it into seed trays. We talked about the peat bogs that had been mined to bring us this most amenable medium. Peat moss is the accumulated work of thousands of years of dilligent living by sphagnum moss. Leaves composed of a single layer of cells unfurl continuously upward while older ones die off below but continue to serve by wicking water up to those green blades above. Where do living and dying meet in this intimate mini-world? Over years, decades, centuries of living, the moss' dying remains create an environment so acidic as to prevent any organisms from entering to engage in the normal business of decay. Ultimately, deep bogs coated in shimmering green are formed. In World War I when bandages ran short, it was the silent work of centuries by moss that came to the rescue, with fluffy antiseptic peat moss used to stanch wounds. One death warding off another. In ancient Ireland, a peat bog was the final resting place for a sacrificial victim whose luck it was to find this antiseptic home. One death preserving another. This is where your potting soil comes from. One death nurturing new life.
Peat bogs are however, like oil, a finite resource and the work of millenia is being consumed too quickly. Coir, or the hairy husk of coconuts that are a normally trashed byproduct of the coconut industry, has also recently come into use as an alternative to peat moss. While the recycling aspect of coir as potting mix is laudable, is replacing one endangered resource with another non-local resource the best option? In many English gardening books, seed-starting mediums are usually described as "composts," designated in their fineness by numbers. While this may simply refer to peat moss mixes, it points back in gardening history to the original solution of sifting compost. Compost would be "riddled" through screens of varying gauges for a determined fineness. Though I admit I am using commercial peat-moss-based mix this year for my seedlings, perhaps investing some time in sifting some of my own compost for future seedlings is the most local sustainable way of beginning the season.
Seed
To call seeds bombs, roots drills, and leaves solar panels is not too metaphoric. The power of seeds' explosive growth in their early stages of germination can alter the landscape, however minute that terrain might be. Some seeds are more powerful than others, and an old gardener's trick takes advantage of this by planting radishes and parsnip seeds together. Radishes are among the quickest harvests, and an especially satisfying first gardening experiment for young children who need instant gratification. From seeding to crunchy spicy treat, radishes take about a month. Parsnips on the other hand are incredibly slow, both in germination and in ultimate harvest. By planting parsnip seeds alongside radishes, the gardener takes advantage of the radishes' explosive growth to break open the soil so that the comparatively more gentle parsnip can easily reach the sunlight.
Plants with tap roots are particularly useful as natural drills in the dense clay soils that we have here around Oberlin. Their main root burrows deep in the ground, not only bringing up deep soil nutrients to the surface through their leaves, but fracturing and aerating the soil. Some gardeners plant daikon radishes in their fields and then deliberately leave them there unharvested to rot through the winter. Each root is like a garden fork and fertilizer in one, breaking up the soil and then decomposing into rich humus by spring.
Finally, leaves truly are solar panels in their ability to convert the energy of the sun into chemical energies stored in sugars and starches. They power all life on the planet. As Michael Pollan wrote in his important letter to then-President-Elect Obama entitled "Farmer in Chief," we can solve many of our national problems by coming to terms with the reality of our "solar economy." Life truly does revolve around the sun and it is leaves that harness its power.
I am writing about seeds as bombs, roots as drills, and leaves as solar panels, but this is merely reverse-engineering language and by extension the world. We would do better to discuss bombs as seeds, drills as roots, and solar panels as leaves. How would our thinking and our actions shift if we set these plant parts as the ground for our human language?
Seedling
Having sowed our seeds, the students and I looked at some trays I had seeded two weeks before: kale and calendula. Cotyledons were unfurled and the first leaves were developing. We "pricked out" the seedlings, that is, transplanted them from their cramped seed trays into more commodious flats, 72 plants to a flat. This is my favorite plant propagation task. There is a meditative quality to the delicacy of the maneuvers that I first learned to appreciate during my training days at Stonecrop Gardens, where myself and the other interns spent many early spring hours in the potting shed at this work.
When pricking out, one should always remember that roots and root hairs are incredibly delicate and that while there are usually two cotyledons and more than one leaf, there is only ever one stem on a seedling, so one should never grab a seedling by its stem lest it get crushed. Chopstick in one hand nudging roots apart from each other, and the fingers of the other hand delicately holding a cotyledon, we teased apart our seedlings. After making a hole in the mix for the new seedling, it is best to submerge it as deeply as possible in the cell, up to but never above the level of the cotyledons. Burying the stem might seem counter-intuitive, but it helps to anchor the new plant. After gently nudging soil mix over the roots it's on to the next seedling. When a whole flat is planted up, it's time to bottom-soak it. Bottom-soaking is preferable to watering from above because it is more gentle and the water acts as a million tiny hands reaching up through each soil particle to remove air gaps and to ensure that the delicate roots come into contact with the soil mix.
As we worked our way through our kale and calendula seedlings, we talked about environmental studies and I asked the students, "What do you need for a local food economy?" Renewable energy, infrastructure, compost, transportation. "What else?" I asked. After lots of good ideas, I shared my own: people who know how to grow food. Going from seed to seedling to plant to harvest is hardly a simple process and it is a knowledge-set that can only truly be acquired through experience. If we are going to create the web of relationships required to live locally, many more of us will have to be involved in food-growing. These four students began taking their first steps toward the knowledge and experience of how to do that.
For me the ideal would be that everyone grow at least some of their food. Even if only growing a small pot of lettuce greens on a windowsill in Brooklyn or the Upper West Side (or an edible fern like Ostrich Fern, Matteucia struthiopteris, for those in shadier apartments?), the act of eating a leaf or a fruit or a frond of something you have grown and lived with begins the road to the solar economy. These plants in the backyard or on the windowsill are our own solar power plants, or better yet we should flip that metaphor around and begin seeing solar power plants as leaf mirror gardens in the desert.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Who is this farmer?
No bad fortune, no good fortune, no loss, no gain;
Never seek such things in eternal serenity.
For years the dusty mirror has gone uncleaned,
Now let us polish it completely, once and for all.
...
Always working alone, always walking alone,
The enlightened one walks the free way of Nirvana
With melody that is old and clear in spirit
And naturally elegant in style,
But with body that is tough and bony,
Passing unnoticed in the world.
It was difficult
to walk away from the George Jones Farm, a place to which I can honestly say I completely gave myself.
to take a chance and step off the hundred-foot pole and onto that farm, and then step off that same pole again off that farm.
It's been even more difficult
to let go of good fortune, and bad fortune.
to let go of losing the security of an unreasonable proposition.
to let go of some fancy of gaining liberation from others.
This year I decided to move on from the George Jones Farm, with a lot of sadness for a dream not fully realized, but with some renewed sense that that dream lies not in one field or another, in one network of relations or another. What and where is this farming practice? What and where does this work take place?
This year I will be concentrating on developing the acre of land our house lives on to grow vegetables, herbs, fruit trees, berries, and more, while working with students and others, sharing what I know and how I think about this work of growing with the world. It will be an experiment in techniques and in approach.
Growing and eating and dying and growing and eating...
Who does this?
Preparing fields or small garden beds, sowing five hundred feet of peas or twenty around the fence encircling an apple tree.
These fingers knitting the soil gently over this seed or that seedling are themselves knitted together by sunlight and the searching mouths of worms in darkness and ever-hungry bees buried deep in flowers and other fingers before them. Who is the farmer here?
In these last days of winter there is the bursting seed coat and the pale tenacity of roots pushing down and cotyledons pushing up. There is growth and there is caring for that growth and there is eating.
There is a farmer "passing unnoticed in the world" hoeing her rows and watering his children. In spring her hands curl in green tendrils "naturally elegant in style." In autumn winds, he sways and creaks with a "body that is tough and bony."
It was difficult to leave (or be left by?) my old job, but really the same farmer is still farming, all the time "always working alone." My fingers knit into his and knit the soil in turn.
Tuesday, February 8, 2011
...There Is Nothing At All
“When the Dharma Body awakens completely,
There is nothing at all.
The source of our self-nature
Is the Buddha of innocent truth.
Mental and physical reactions come and go
Like clouds in the empty sky;
Greed, hatred, and ignorance appear and disappear
Like bubbles on the surface of the sea.”
(from Zhengdaoge/Shodoka)
“When the Dharma Body awakens completely/ There is nothing at all…”
Mycorrhizae, root hairs, ants, voles.
Birds, acorns, barberry fruits, and seeds in a matrix of excrement.
Winds used to carry North American pine pollen hundreds of miles out into the Atlantic Ocean, dumbfounding European sailors in clouds of gold.
Canopy leaves catch dust in the hot breeze, rains catch dust in vertical rivers, bark catches dust floods in channels, moss catches innumerable unkown Nile silts in luxuriant green deltas at the foot of the oak in the backyard.
Who is in control?
To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. That myriad things come forth and experience themselves is awakening.
Looking out, there are birds and roots, dust and leaves and moss.
Looking around, what is there? Kaleidoscope center, still point among the shifting colors. Amazement.
The sailors lift their eyes from their tasks to see the backs of their hands, the rigging, and the sails, the sky and the clouds covered in gold. Their mouths hang open and their eyes widen, lost.
Monday, February 7, 2011
The Leisurely One
Pardon the hiatus but I was in Uruguay with my partner Kazim visiting family in January.
Two times a year my sangha, The Village Zendo, engages in Ango practice. Hearkening back to the original rainy season retreats of the early Buddhist sangha, ango (meaning "peaceful dwelling") is a period of intensified daily practice. We are currently in an Ango period, and the study text for this period is a long poem by the Chinese Zen master, Yongjia Xuanjue, called the Zhengdaoge (Shodoka in Japanese). I have decided to read it stanza by stanza with an ear towards what it says about my farming practice, and will occasionally make posts on thoughts that arise
“There is the leisurely one…” What might it mean to farm leisurely? Hardly “gentleman farming,” rather a kind of poor man’s farming.
Chuangzi: So removed from civilization were they that they forgot how to speak.
Mumon: His speech is rough, his writing illegible.
To farm leisurely might mean farming
as if your life depended on it,
as if farming was your life,
as if life was nothing but farming.
As if:
In June Kazim and I pick deep red-purple serviceberries from the trees in Tappan Square in the pallid violet of twilight.
In the evening I pad out the back door and through the high grass to pick orange day-lily blossoms one day short of bursting open into a great steel bowl. Then I string them with needle and thread and hang them to dry for winter soups and stir-fries.
Hurrying ahead of the wave of frost, we work though the evening until even headlights aren’t enough, picking tomatoes and peppers, hanging the immature cayennes upside down so that they continue to ripen to red.
Cattails in spring, lamb’s quarters in summer, mushrooms in autumn.
Hang acorns in an onion bag in a toilet tank and with each flush slowly leach the tannins. Every week hang mint to dry for winter tea.
Save seeds at every opportunity. Seeds in pants pockets, shirt pockets, stuffed in backpack pouches. What were these again?
Read and dream and forget. Hatch plans.
Spend evenings chopping, washing, mixing, pickling.
Two times a year my sangha, The Village Zendo, engages in Ango practice. Hearkening back to the original rainy season retreats of the early Buddhist sangha, ango (meaning "peaceful dwelling") is a period of intensified daily practice. We are currently in an Ango period, and the study text for this period is a long poem by the Chinese Zen master, Yongjia Xuanjue, called the Zhengdaoge (Shodoka in Japanese). I have decided to read it stanza by stanza with an ear towards what it says about my farming practice, and will occasionally make posts on thoughts that arise
"There is the leisurely one,
Walking the Tao, beyond philosophy,
Walking the Tao, beyond philosophy,
Not avoiding fantasy, not seeking truth.
The real nature of ignorance is the Buddha-nature itself;
The empty delusory body is the very body of the Dharma."
“There is the leisurely one…” What might it mean to farm leisurely? Hardly “gentleman farming,” rather a kind of poor man’s farming.
Chuangzi: So removed from civilization were they that they forgot how to speak.
Mumon: His speech is rough, his writing illegible.
To farm leisurely might mean farming
as if your life depended on it,
as if farming was your life,
as if life was nothing but farming.
As if:
In June Kazim and I pick deep red-purple serviceberries from the trees in Tappan Square in the pallid violet of twilight.
In the evening I pad out the back door and through the high grass to pick orange day-lily blossoms one day short of bursting open into a great steel bowl. Then I string them with needle and thread and hang them to dry for winter soups and stir-fries.
Hurrying ahead of the wave of frost, we work though the evening until even headlights aren’t enough, picking tomatoes and peppers, hanging the immature cayennes upside down so that they continue to ripen to red.
Cattails in spring, lamb’s quarters in summer, mushrooms in autumn.
Hang acorns in an onion bag in a toilet tank and with each flush slowly leach the tannins. Every week hang mint to dry for winter tea.
Save seeds at every opportunity. Seeds in pants pockets, shirt pockets, stuffed in backpack pouches. What were these again?
Read and dream and forget. Hatch plans.
Spend evenings chopping, washing, mixing, pickling.
Monday, December 13, 2010
A Year in Pictures: 2010
Spring
Preparing a bed for planting peas.
Judy Laushmann, Ben Knowles, Mandy Fracchione, and Kazim Ali pull weeds and harvest dandelion roots for roasted dandelion tea at the same time.
Domenico Ruggierio of Oberlin College's Multicultural Resource Center uses a broadfork to aerate soil without disturbing its profile.
The Hawken School and Cleveland Oberlin College Alumni showed up in force to prepare the fields and plant leeks! Thanks to Matt Young of Hawken School and Kira McGirr of Cleveland OC Alums for organizing this, and thanks to all the parents, students, and alums who came out.
Springtime greenhouse: lettuces, scallions, Chinese cabbage.
Royal Oakleaf Lettuce.
Touring Old Haunts During a Spring Trip Away from the Farm
Stonecrop Gardens, Cold Spring, NY: A plant-lover's paradise, and where I spent a year training as a horticulturist.
Stonecrop's Gunnera tinctoria. The Chilean Rhubarb is the largest herbaceous plant on Earth. The tallest leaf in this picture is about 7ft tall and still growing! Though hardy to Zone 8, gardening wizardry keeps this plant alive in Stonecrop's Zone 4 weather.
Stonecrop: A straw Gertrude Jekyll overlooks the vegetable garden.
Stonecrop: the Flower Garden.
Stonecrop: the Gravel Garden.
Stonecrop: The Wisteria Pavilion.
Stonecrop: The Horticulture Library.
The Cloisters, New York, NY: A refuge of calm in the busy city, The Cloisters is a branch museum of The Metropolitan Museum of Art dedicated to Medieval art and culture. It is so named for the series of open courtyards that house period-style gardens. I was a horticulturist here for three years.
Hops climbing up the Bonnefont Arcade.
Trie Cloister.
The Village Zendo, New York City: My home temple where I have practiced Zen for 11 years.
Summer
Garlic, garlic everywhere. Summer interns Ben Agsten, Emma Cunniff, Gabe Baldasare, Patrick Gilfeather, Assistant Grower Freed, Ian Burns, and WIlly Wickham.
Garlic: bunching and hanging. For the next week the strawbale building was redolent with the pungency of curing garlic, somewhat yeasty like baking bread.
Oberlin Farmers' Market Stand: Me and Freed manning the stand.
Fall
Oberlin College Annual Day of Service: Every year the George Jones Farm hosts new first-years who come out for a day of volunteer service as part of their orientation.
Day of Service: Weeding a greenhouse to get it ready for fall planting.
Day of Service: Education Coordinator/Operations Manager Evelyn Bryant and a volunteer planting lettuce.
Day of Service: Weeding turnips and lettuce mix.
Day of Service: the last big project of the day was replacing the plastic on this greenhouse.
It was a team effort.
Thank OC first-years for all your help. Welcome to Oberlin!
November Markets at the Farm
We still had lots of produce to offer.
A happy customer with her edible holiday wreath.
Sunday, December 12, 2010
Harvesting the Future: Seed Saving
George Jones Farm interns Danny Cowan, Rachel Cotterman, and Emma Cunniff saving celery seeds.
The growing season is finally done. The fields are covered in snow and the last cuts of salad mix have been harvested from the greenhouses. Temperatures are hovering in the 20s during the day and snow is a daily occurrence. But one more harvest remains: seeds.
Over the course of the year, I made sure to leave some of our crops alone. Collards overwintered from last year rose up into billowing towers of creamy yellow blossoms followed by slender aqua blue seed pods. Intensely flavored soup stock celery provided a nice early spring crop before stretching up to the sky and bolting into a profusion of delicate and very fragrant umbels that gave way to the tiniest of seeds. Both collard and celery flowers made for great seasonal additions to our salad mixes (dill and parsley flowers also offered bright accents), but I always made sure to leave some alone.
As spring turned into summer the collard's glaucous seed pods weighed heavy and the stalks bent low, the pods shifting from blue to gold as they dried. As summer turned to fall, the celery's green seeds turned deep brown and dry. This is the time to harvest the future. In the mad scrabble of harvest season to get every ripening tomato before it splits and every head of lettuce before it bolts, take some time out on a dry day to cut back these dry seed heads, put them in a paper bag, label them and stow them away in a dry, dark place.
Now in these cold days, those crumpled paper bags can come out of hiding and slowly but surely seeds can be separated from chaff and sealed in paper envelopes and carefully labeled for next spring. When I trained as a horticulturist at Stonecrop Gardens, I spent all of January 2004 cleaning and saving seeds. What a wonderful time to spend in the potting shed hunched over bins of an incredibly diverse array of seeds. Shimmying the pans, tossing them to winnow chaff, using strainers of varying gauges. Campanula seeds like shining dust and shimmering silver Ricinus seeds like sinister coffee beans.
Why save seeds?
Firstly, from those training days, poring for hour after hour over seeds and dried inflorescences was for me the best way to develop an intimate and intuitive understanding of plant families. Each family of related plants has its special way of conveying itself through time from one generation to another. Apiaceae (celery, parsley, fennel, e.g.) seeds for example have a ridged coating and a bend in them that makes them unmistakable, whether large like angelica or lovage seed or miniscule like celery seed. This may seem an abstract reason, but most of us have grown up so removed from intimacy with nature that this kind of learning develops a powerful intuition later in the field later. I may not know what wild mustard is but as soon as I see those yellow flowers and then later those narrow silique seedpods waving in the wind, I know exactly what those seeds are going to taste like. Playing with seeds inside in winter can offer one avenue for becoming conversant with the world around us through the rest of the year. And the best way is to hold them in your hands, sift them from the chaff, roll them between thiumb and forefinger, hour after hour.
Beyond this, there is utility. Seeds make plants. The next growing season is only too close and those seed packets can add up to big bucks once your greedy eyes have perused the stack of bewitching catalogs that show up in your mailbox. Saving seeds from your own plants is a way of trimming costs and making next year's garden truly "local" from the very start.
Back to the abstract, for me the most exciting reason to save seed is participating in a years-long, decades-long, centuries-long process of developing bioregion-specific -- even site-specific -- vegetables. When I grow a patch of collards and one plant grows noticeably bigger leaves or fends off cabbage worms particularly well or makes it through summer droughts better than others, and I save seed from that plant I am joining a line of farmers stretching back to the beginning of agriculture. And when I save collard seeds consistently year after year, the resulting plants will become ever better at growing in just this set of circumstances that Oberlin, Ohio presents. They will truly be of this particular place.
In this way, seed saving truly is harvesting the future.
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