Re-planting

When we got back from our three-week jaunt to Utah/Colorado/Idaho earlier this summer, the arugula (a nutty-tasting salad green) and spinach plants in our garden had gone to seed. From every plant, a shoot had shot up a couple of feet; leaves, as if surprised by the sudden surge away from the earth, clung desperately, limply, to the sides of the new stalks. I picked a few of these leaves--we added some to salads--but the good taste had gone out of them. They had passed beyond their prime and had set about procreating, had done what all life tries to do: perpetuate itself.

I think what most people do, what I've always done when a plant goes to seed and no longer produces food, is pull up the plant and toss it into the compost pile or dispose of it in some other way. But this time I didn't want to do that. I wanted to see what would happen if I let these plants do what they wanted to do. I asked myself why do we buy packets of seeds every year? Why not let the plants supply their own offspring? I kept watering the plot they were in and observed as more seeds populated the spinach stalks, more seed pods stretched away from the arugula stalks. At first the seeds and seed pods were green, moist, soft. The arugula seeds were tiny in their pods, but they exploded with a peppery, nutty, radishy flavor when I sampled them. Slowly they began to dry out and firm up. But I was worried the seeds might not be any good.

In recent history, as agribusiness has mostly outgrown local production and become a major industry, people have bred and modified some plants so that they are sterile. They may or may not produce seeds, but they don't produce any offspring. Other plants have been genetically modified significantly enough that their seeds can be patented; it is illegal to collect and re-plant these seeds. Both scenarios--intentionally producing and perpetuating sterile crops, and making it illegal to re-plant a seed--seem to me bizarre and mildly abhorrent. This strong human desire to own, to control, to manipulate, to dictate even to nature is just weird and possibly very destructive. When food corporations completely dictate or shut down the reproductive capacities of edible plants, they reinforce the idea that profit is more important than life.

Scandinavians, by investing in and building Svalbard International Seed Vault in a remote area of Norway, have recently taken an important and decisive step toward preserving plant life, toward ensuring the survival of millions of plant species against natural disasters, wars, and human interference. This seed vault has been called, sometimes derogatorily, the "Dooms-Day Vault" or "Noah's Ark," but I find its presence to be rather comforting, even though it is very, very far away from me. It shows that, somewhere at least, people care enough about the essence of life to drill a huge hole into a frozen mountain and store millions of seeds from all over the world, to be re-distributed at need. All this effort and money to build a vault to store not gold or military weaponry, but seeds, which are at once so banal and so benignant.

When the arugula and spinach seeds were dry and seemed to be ready, I decided to make our own mini seed vault. The seeds came free easily, eagerly. It took a little while to separate the seeds from the organic debris that came with them. I lightly shook the arugula seeds in a bowl and picked out the dried pods. With the spinach seeds came many small pieces of brittle, papery yellowish leaves. These I had to blow away like wheat chaff. Once I had a small pile of each type of seed (I gathered enough to last about 15-20 plantings), I set the seeds aside, dug up the plot, and re-planted two rows of arugula and two rows of spinach to see if the seeds were good. The rest of the seeds I stored in brown paper pouches. In three days, the arugula had sprouted; two days later the spinach started coming up. It took twice that long for the seeds to germinate in the spring. The whole process has been strangely exhilarating.

Now I'm thinking we'll harvest seeds from all the plants in the garden that do well. These seeds will form the foundation of next year's garden. Another idea I had today was that we should buy produce from the local farmers market and get seeds from the plants (tomatoes, cantaloupes, peppers, cucumbers, peaches, cherries, etc.). These plants have been grown locally and should, therefore, do well in the local climate, as opposed to a seed packet sold in Washington filled with seeds produced from a plant in Florida.

I can't help but think that my recent interest in the perpetuation of plants has something to do with my interest in my family. Elizabeth and I tried for four years before we got pregnant with Sonora. We thought we were sterile, but now we have two miraculous daughters, now a sapling and a seedling, both straining upward, plunging their branches toward the sun. My parents are nearing retirement. They went to seed a while ago. They move cautiously and are becoming a little more brittle each year. I have one grandparent left: my mom's mom. We are all of her stock.


About a month ago, while Sonora and I were out for a walk on a Sunday afternoon, we saw the biggest cherry tree I've ever seen. It stood as tall and almost as wide as the two-story Victorian home in whose front yard it was rooted. I lingered, wondering if I couldn't collect some of the ripe deep-burgundy cherries. While I was staring at the tree, a short, thin, jolly old man approached Sonora and me from across the street. His captivating smile was that of a person who thrilled in making other people happy. He asked us if we wanted some of those cherries. I said we did, but we didn't have any way to carry them. He went home and returned with eight empty plastic whipped-cream containers. He used to live in this house, he told me. Now his son lived there, though he was out of town for the weekend. The old man's son had planted that tree for his daughter when she was a little girl. She is now in her forties.

A seedling planted by a father for his daughter. And Sonora and I stood in its shade as it towered over us.

The cherries were sweet and juicy and full. Sonora helped me pick some, but she mostly stained crimson her face and hands and shirt; even though she picked many cherries, her container never filled up. We brought seven full containers home to Elizabeth and we all ate them over the next week.

Even before I had harvested the spinach and arugula seeds, before I knew I was interested in saving seeds, I saved a few of those cherry seeds and pushed them into the moist earth near our home. I saved them because their parent had grown well in this town, had grown well for that man's daughter, for that old man's granddaughter. I hope our small seeds will grow tall and spread their branches wide, wide over us. While we are waiting for that to happen, we will enjoy the cycle of planting, caring, harvesting, eating. To get the whole thing started, we'll have spring greens this autumn.