The Shoots of Spring
I’m standing in an aisle at a local feed mill waiting for my sack of layer mash to arrive from the back. Normally this wouldn’t be where I would wait, but the stand of this years’ vegetable seeds is gleaming like a beacon of hope in the middle of a weird and seemingly endless winter, and if there is anything that I am a sucker for, it’s buying seeds.
Fast forward a month later and fresh trays of seed starting soil are soaked and intricately planted with things like tomatoes, peppers, and onions of all different varieties. It won’t take the green onions and shallots long to emerge – maybe fourteen days. The rest will come along as nature intended.
Starting seeds is an investment. You’re not only choosing to invest in yourself, but also the future of your gardens, too. I think that is why I love this so much. At some point I will come downstairs to water the trays and all of the sudden a tiny forest of emerging green will be there where there had been none just twenty four hours prior.
The discovery of such is akin to the feeling of Christmas day when you’re a child – or at least that’s how it is for me.
Starting seeds, as far as I’m concerned, is a lesson in success and failure, because during any given year while doing this, you are bound to experience both. Not all of these little seedlings will make it, whether from pests, disease, drought, or just weak seedlings (hey, they can’t all be perfect!), inevitably there will be loss.
The great thing about loss is that it heightens the elation when our efforts are met with success later – it’s tough to truly enjoy a sunny day if you’ve never experienced a rainy one, right? But when all is said and done, starting seeds is the gateway to a life of self reliance, and that’s something all of us can get behind, especially lately.
I truly love everything there is to love about seed starting. The heat pads, lights, flimsy trays, the mess, the whole dang process. It’s as though something inside me on a very primal cellular level was born and bred to do this. To take the time to hold myself accountable for where the plants that some of my food will grow on this year, come from. Maybe we need to start to shift that idea – accountability – into more areas of our lives. Maybe starting seeds is a good place to begin from!
All of this is to say that with each seedling that makes it into the ground right around the long weekend in May, I hold a certain level of gratitude for each and every single one of them, and you ought to, too. It’s no easy feat to make it in this world, for either plant or people.
And if nothing else, putting a few dozen seeds into starting mix is a nod toward having faith that spring will, at some point, arrive. No matter how endless winter may seem, warmer days and happy gardens are just a tray full of seedlings away.
Mike Fitzerald is an avid outdoorsman and knowledgeable homesteader who writes for multiple publications about living off the land. You can follow him on his adventures via Instagram as @onmivore.culture
