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Security and Adventure pt. 3: Travails, Fruition
Since our last, exuberant, update, our seedlings and their keepers have led increasingly precarious lives. A seedling’s first weeks are fraught with peril. Too much water, too little water, to much light, too little light, the wrong kinds of light: all can doom the endeavoring young tomato vine or bok choy to sickliness and death. We waited with bated breath – an eternity, it seemed – for the first sprout to enter the realm of the visible. Had we been too stingy, or more likely, too generous, with those simple things that a growing plant craves? Had we smothered it with sweetness?
The last days have been merciful. We have been favored with nascent tomatoes, greens, strawberries, peppers and cucumbers. New vegetation erupts daily from the potting soil and on one’s knees there arrives the uncanny sight of lilliputian rain forest.
Yet we are not in the clear. It appears that there is no proverbial “clear” for the amateur agriculturalist – one bounds from emergency to calamity to crisis. We have now to combat “legginess” and “root rot,” and later our predicaments will not abate but expand. We can only look forward to the trauma of transplanting our seedlings to the outdoors, to predators animal and viral, to the dark and fickle humor of northern climes.
Occasionally it seems unseemly to tend with fury to our seedlings indoors, and especially during weeks of dazzling sunlight and spring warmth. Yet this very morning we were vindicated in our precautions: the wet snow has begun to fall and, showing no sign of stopping, the entire plot will soon be covered in freezing precipitation. Security and adventure.
Written by robin on 04/16/2010 in AITA In The Wild | Blog | Food | Gardening | Sculpture/Installation | The Farm
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