Seeds of resilience

Like every gardener, I was chomping at the bit all winter to get my hands in the dirt. Being stuck at home for so much of the past year only made the impulse keener. I went big this year, using up all my old tomato and pepper seed along with a whole whack of new varieties.

Because I live in the valley, I usually count back from the first full moon of June to figure out when to start my seedlings. This year I enthusiastically (and unquestioningly) took the advice of a distant friend and assumed, incorrectly, that all my tomatoes and peppers would live in my little covid-project greenhouse. I nursed my plants along through the late winter, watching them flourish, and I was feeling like a champ. Then it began to dawn on me that maybe, perhaps, I had started too early. Like WAY too early. Seeing my gardener friends’ faces when they saw how big my plants were was an unwelcome lesson in humility. On the diplomatically-delivered counsel of my husband, I started a second round in case the first were just too huge to transplant. I now have comically-large tomato plants draped over every horizontal surface in the house. Can you say tomato overload?

It goes without saying that I have spent an inordinate amount of time this year squeezing my fingers into tiny little seed packets. All while reading a great book called The Lab Girl by Hope Jahren, a memoir of a geobotanist whose research and fascination with plant life is seriously contagious and has taught me so much.

A seed is like a little miracle. In each tiny seed is everything a baby plant needs to survive, a radicle (the beginnings of the root), the endosperm which provides food until the plant can make its own and an embryo with one or two seed leaves, called cotyledons. Wheat and grasses have one (a monocot) while most of what we put in our flower beds and vegetable gardens have two (dicots).

The seed swelling with water sets off the germination process and then the cotyledons, or seed leaves, emerge. That first pair of leaves bears no resemblance to the true leaves that come afterward. If this is a clever strategy to foil weeders, it is maddeningly effective. The cotyledon has just enough energy in it to keep the baby plant alive until it can produce a true leaf and begin photosynthesizing light to feed itself. The true leaves are often pulled up and out of the ground backward to keep them from being damaged because there isn’t enough energy in the plant to do it twice.

If you’ve ever looked closely at a peanut, the two halves are the cotyledon and there’s a tiny little nub nestled between them which has two parts, one that points out of the peanut, the radicle (root) and one growing toward the inside, the plumule (the beginnings of the true leaves).Crazy to think that all those components (and more) exist in the smallest of seeds (think poppy seed or even crazier, carrot seed).

If you’re saving seeds, a good rule of thumb for storage is the temperature of the room in Fahrenheit plus the humidity level (%) should be less than 100.

Plants have ingenious ways of making their seeds go dormant— a strategy that can mean staggered germination to help keep itself from being eaten all at the same time by hungry herbivores or remaining viable to hang on through unsuitable conditions to germinate later. Scientists have effectively sprouted a date palm seed that was more than 2000 years old! Plants like the lodgepole pine have cones that are sealed shut with resin which will only release its seed when melted in a forest fire, perhaps in a bid to flourish when its competition has been incinerated.

Only one in a million seeds actually germinates. Different plants require different recipes of sunshine, heat and moisture but once the seed sets its root, that’s it. There’s no going back. The seedling is committed to its location until the end of its days - for a summer if it’s a head of lettuce, for hundreds of years if it’s an oak. Zero sunshine, brutal winter, floods, forest fires - it makes do or dies. Its resilience is something to be marvelled at. It makes the most of what it’s got, something we humans have had to do an awful lot of in the last couple of years. It's also something that’s a lot easier to accept when you’re holding a sun-warmed tomato in your hands.