Field Notes -- Seeds

In the spring (indeed, even in the final days of winter at the first flush of a temperate day), gardeners become as excited—and avaricious—as kids in a proverbial candy store as we peruse seed packet displays and catalogs, letting the colorful photos and illustrations of fruits and flowers spark our dreams of a garden’s bounty.

But by late summer, our garden’s own seed-making typically escapes our attention. Rather, it’s the “weed” seeds we notice, the dandelion and milkweed fluff carried on the breeze to trigger seasonal allergies, or burrs and other hitchhikers catching a ride on our socks from a weekend hike. We may not notice the seeds of fallen tomatoes left to decompose until the volunteer plants remind us the following year.

What if we gave the same intentionality to seeds in the summer as we do in the spring?

Maybe it’s no accident that spring’s fascination with seeds is often commercial, packaging playing a big role in capturing our imaginations and promising produce (literal production), whereas end-of-season seed collecting and seed saving is profoundly anti-commercial.

Planting seeds—literally and metaphorically—gets a lot of our attention at the beginning of the season cycle, but shouldn’t we give equal consideration to the plant that’s grown, lived its course, and will soon be gone? Do we stop to think about how it met our expectations or what lessons it helped us learn about how to cultivate what we dream of? And if it has been successful, do we realize the key to remaking it again lies not in next year’s colorful catalog, but within itself—in the form of a small, dry seed?