Sleeping Peas

The garden is rife with opportunities to anthropomorphize. The plants are really thirsty, they reach for the sun and leap out of the ground, and they pout. We like to think of our gardens in terms we understand.

Pea planting this last weekend (late, I know) allowed me a chance to indulge one of my favorite plants-as-human fantasies. I imagine the seeds tucked in a bed of rich soil, sleeping and dreaming of spring. The sun will come and warm the soil. The seeds will swell and sprout and the cycle will begin again.

And this is happening all over the garden. Perennials that appear dead aboveground are still hibernating in the earth, with pale tiny leaves and shoots. Fruit buds on trees are tightly closed but all manner of hormonal changes are taking place as the days grow longer and temperatures begin to moderate. Tomato seeds, little more than flakes when planted, will imbibe water, absorb heat and soon push out a radicle and cotyledons.

Last night a dusting of wet snow fell on the garden. As I lay under blankets in the pre-dawn darkness I thought about my newly planted seeds under their own rich blankets of compost and snow, waiting out the capricious early spring weather, waiting and ready to go.

Value Seeds

Imagine a cross between Thompson and Morgan Seeds and the Dollar Store. A place where a daydreaming gardener can find those special cultivars that TM is so famous for, where no seed packet is priced higher than 99 cents. A place somewhere in horticultural twilight zone you say? Check out Value Seeds.

Prevailing internet wisdom claims that Value Seeds is an overstock outlet for TM. A quick scan of both sites shows the same descriptions for many items. Some contributors at Garden Watchdog speculate that the seed is last year’s but many comments report good germination. And the selection, while small, contains some winners and boasts nine sweet pea cultivars.

This value is no frills, however. The seed packets are not marked with plant information, only with a number, much like the small foil envelopes inside the larger paper TM packets. Planting information is available on the web site. One customer recommends marking your packets with an identification as soon as you receive your order, matching the number on the packet with the invoice list that comes with your order.

Each spring I order many seeds and usually with no discernible self discipline. But placing an order for 12 seed packets with a total price of $9.77 including shipping effectively nips buyer's remorse in the bud. I look forward to posting a happy outcome when the seeds are germinated and thriving.

Seed starting

Carol at May Dreams Garden posted a series of questions about seed sowing habits and was rewarded with many comments and blog posts concerning seeds. A subsequent post listing many of these answers made for fascinating reading. Responses ranged all along the spectrum, pointing up the marvelous diversity of gardening styles.

This whole series of posts set me to thinking about seed starting. Nurseries certainly offer plenty of starts including a respectable number of heirlooms. What cannot be found at the nurseries is often available at farmer’s markets. So why start seeds?

Pragmatic answers abound. Seed starting is economical, variety is vastly greater, and scheduling is not left to commercial interest. But for me there is some other intangible consideration that I can’t quite put my (green) finger on.

It could be as simple as the increasing daylength triggering my desire for garden activity. Opportunities are limited in January so seed starting fits the bill. My small corner of a shared greenhouse offers a warm space where I can almost imagine spring to be right around the corner. This alone could explain my annual seed starting ritual.

But still there is a more elusive appeal. I think I am a little closer to understanding after recently reading a passage from Heirloom Vegetable Gardening by William Woys Weaver. He writes of an elderly cousin Mary whom he credits with introducing him to the importance of plants:

She was adamant: this was a Quaker thing, a fitting activity for a pacifist, and a moral requirement for a nurturing temperament.

Reading this passage I am inclined to think that the intent of her belief can be carried beyond Quakers to include all spiritual disciplines. But the phrase that really caught my attention was ‘moral requirement for a nurturing temperament’. Does this mean a duty of those with such nurturing tendencies or rather a prerequisite of sorts? I would like to add this woman to my list of imaginary dinner guests, seat her next to Thomas Jefferson and sit back to listen!

My sense of all this is that gardeners possess a nurturing temperament, but on a more subconscious level. I don’t think much about the connection I feel when I sow the seeds, the deep thrill when they germinate and the satisfaction when I finally plant them in the earth. That’s just the way of it. Maybe for me this moral requirement is simply the unexamined visceral reverence for the miracle of a seed.

Woolgathering and analysis aside, seed starting serves a very important function. It serves to bridge the wildly extravagant imaginings of seed ordering and the down to earth spring planting. By the time the seedlings are hardened off and ready to plant, the inevitable failures and successes will have readied the gardener as well for the real work of the garden.

This week I will begin my seed starting with cool weather crops: parsley, lettuces and greens. Beginning the seed starting really marks my first day of spring.

Everything in its season; ain’t it grand?

Seeds

Thanks to this post by Talitha Purdy at Cold Climate Gardening I am now a Fedco devotee. Fedco is a seed cooperative started in 1978 and offers a great selection of seed varieties, many organic, at reasonable prices. But it is so much more than that. The catalog is amazing. All newsprint, illustrated with black and white drawings and clipart, it is one of the most informative and enjoyable catalogs I have ever used. It is peppered with quotes, jokes, groaner puns, an illustrative diagram of "The Gardener's Brain (with Seat of compost pride& greed and First pea envy area) and very detailed growing information.

In addition, Fedco is unabashedly political, taking on agribusiness with its recent decision to drop the Seminis seed line now that Monsanto has bought the company. But the choice was not unilateral. Customers were given several choices and the majority indicated that they did not want to continue with a Monsanto business.

Beyond their biopolitical stance, what has endeared me to this company is the honest descriptions of varieties. If low germination is a problem, the customer is not left to discover that at planting time. I was especially glad for the heads up on a pea variety that I wanted to order

Peas come 6-10 (6.64 average in 2004) to a pod, sweet and delicious if harvested promptly when a little under full size. Caution: Quality drops off rapidly after reaching full size. Since pods ripen very uniformly, noted CSA grower Elizabeth Henderson suggests making succession plantings.

Had I planted these and harvested a little late I might have been very disappointed with the variety. These kinds of descriptions are as valuable as talking with a fellow gardener over a glass of iced tea.

How this gem of a company escaped my notice for so long is a mystery.