we’re searching for awe and lessons and kinship
The only two differences between a Hogwarts Transfiguration class and a seed turning into a plant is a wand and time.
In other words, if you can grow a plant from seed, you can perform magic.
Do you know how long it takes for a perennial garden bed to fully flourish?
Three years (more if rabbits are cutting everything down).
Every time it rains heavily, we rediscover that the backyard floods in a certain spot. One half of my relationship said we needed to install a drainage system. My question to that was always, “but where would it drain?”
I, an expert* on rain gardens, thought a planting scheme was in order.
I had big plans for my kitchen garden. I even made an extensive spreadsheet and shared it on my blog. Don’t try to find it. After everything I’ve already learned this season, it needs hella revisions.
Me, as a creep: (opens trench coat) psssssst! Free plants?
They’ll do well in your garden! Guaranteed. And I bet you’ll like them, since you already have them…Whatdoyasay?
You, nervous: Suuuuure
Also me, but normal: Great! Because…
We’re Dividing Plants! (Don’t run away!)
What…we care about grass?
If my neighbor’s grass is greener than mine, all that tells me is that they’re using a ton of water and synthetic chemicals. Otherwise, we’d all have similarly hued grass. So is my neighbor opting to “outdo” us all with high water usage and poisons that season our water supply? Sounds like a one-two punch against the ingredients we all need to survive.
I had a front row seat to the Giant Scabious evolution. I couldn’t not see her, even in her minimus stage. But I seem to register her evolution more vividly than my own. I have grown along with her, especially as a mother and gardener. My foliage is lush, my buds are shooting up. Soon, I’ll flower. I hope that I am rooted enough in the present to watch.
(Read the following in your best David Attenborough voice)
The gardener emerges from the backdoor after a long winter; she is hesitant to shed her outer layers. Her thin, pale skin will need time to strengthen and harden as the weather warms. It has been a long time since she enjoyed the warm sun on her skin.
In her pouch, she carries numerous packets of seeds. These will feed her mentally over the course of the next few months, until warm days are in earnest. This early in the year, she can’t yet truly garden. But sowing these seeds will do the job, for now.
And so her seed sowing journey begins.
It goes a little something like this:
First Step: Coffee
Second Step: Couch
Third Step: two sips of coffee
Fourth Step: Go outside with coffee and check on plants