There is a distinct kind of bait-and-switch in the way we plan for spring versus how the season actually plays out. Spring is capricious—it builds up your hopes with cool, gentle mornings where you play bouncy, soft reggae by Bluetooth (just me?) engendering a unquestioned trust in the earth and its intentions for you, your coffee lingers on a stump nearby. Then a sweltering summer heatwave hits before you can say “My sunscreen’s expired.”
All winter and spring, you’ve practice a quiet, deliberate forward-thinking. You take seeds that require the friction of winter—wild ginger, obedient plant, broad-leaved sorrel, wild strawberry, common blue violet—and you tuck them away for cold stratification. You plan for the day they will become the lush ground cover beneath the young hawthorns, Carolina buckthorns, and river alders forming the future eastern windbreak. You protect them, still used to a passive dedication.
Then the hot, hot world washes over you.
Lately, my own seedlings have been living in the greenhouse at the McElroy House. It was a strategic move, mostly to keep them safe from the lounging cats and loose, foraging chickens. But by noon, that greenhouse turns into a wicked-hot oven, even with the doors open, and my schedule doesn’t put me there to water until 3pm or even the next day entirely. The plants are ready for the earth, but the momentum of daily life means the hours get swallowed up before the shovel ever hits the dirt. They are leggy, they are stressed, and they are holding on.
It’s easy to feel like you’re falling short or even to convince yourself you’ve lost when your own garden is in survival mode. But this week, a different kind of growth reminded me why we do this.
The Reality of the Season: Sometimes, your own seeds have to sit in the stress a little longer than you intended and longer than you think they can bare. But the work you do isn’t always restricted to your own garden.
Recently, neighbors and permaculture friends of ours (the good folks at Lost Eden Farms) who attended our persimmon workshop last November reached out with a celebration. They had taken a seed, applied the exact cold-stratification process we learned about that day, and successfully germinated a persimmon seedling of their own.
I’ve since hauled many of those stressed seedlings back to the primary gardens at the Sulphur Springs Truck Patch headquarters. It is a move driven by a perhaps naive hope that I can at least buy them some time in bigger pots, if not get them directly into the ground. There is rain in the forecast this weekend, and in this game, you learn to lean hard into whatever mercy the weather decides to give you. The ground covers might be leggy, and the schedule is still a little wreck, but we’re moving forward anyway.
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