A Healer’s Geste

Garden: off to a running start

At the beginning of the month, I started some seeds inside in foil cake pans. I started some flowers, some herbs, some cucumbers, and some lettuce.

I poked holes in the bottom of the pan and used seed starter soil, then watered it from the bottom by putting water in a pan and the foil pan in the water bath. I covered it to mimic a greenhouse effect. The book said that seeds will germinate best at 70-degrees and we generally keep our house closer to 65 in the cool months, so once or twice a day I would turn the oven on for a minute or two, then turn it off and let the seeds sit in there. They sprouted within 3 days!

So I uncovered the pan and let them sit out in the sun during the day, then put them in the barely-warmed oven at night. I thought I was managing everything very well and was pretty pleased with myself. That’s always a bad sign.

Yes. One morning I turned the oven on, forgetting — until the oven beeped that it had reached 350-degrees — that the seeds were in there.

My beautiful seedlings were burnt.

But it was time to start preparing the outside garden. So, I barely did anything in one corner and Hans and Jaeger planted some baby sunflower seeds that are supposed to grow 2-3 feet tall and I planted peas and cucumbers. Over the next couple days, I prepared one little 1×1-foot plot at a time and so far have a bed of baby carrots, radishes, lettuce, and spinach.

I admit after planting the seeds I started feeling doubtful and skeptical. Is that all? Seeds in the dirt and I’ll get fresh vegetables? Right here? It can’t work. It’s got to be more complicated than that. Even more complicated than digging down 6-12 inches; sifting the dirt of rocks; mixing it with compost, peat moss, and fertilizer; watering; and poking a few tiny seeds in intervals. It really did not take as much effort or time as I had anticipated. But would it work?

A week went by. Nothing. Yes, surely I missed something. Surely this wouldn’t really work. Carrots from those little seeds? Salads from a 1′x2′ plot of ground poked with seeds? No, it couldn’t work. It’s just not plausible.

But the earth and those seeds, and the soil and the water and the sun worked their deep magic together and in 9 days — lo! — several little seedlings were poking up in the sunflower bed and one little green shoot poked up in the pea plot. But could it really be a pea plant? Are you serious?

That’s all I had to do and I’ll be able to snack on pea pods in a month and a half? Well, well, we’re still a little skeptical.

And now even more sunflower seedlings are poking themselves up out of the ground and growing sturdy, one more pea is spiking out of the ground, and three little radish leaves are unfolding.

And I still have 3/4 of the garden to cultivate.