News from the Garden: Yellow squash sprouts, 3 April 2009.
Plant after plant has sprouted over the last nine months; yet something about new life in the soil never ceases to amaze me. We’ve become so accustomed to food coming from a store that it’s tempting to imagine the yellow squash coming from a sanitized clean room somewhere off in a lab. But that’s not how food works.
For our part we had three loads of landscaping soil, which we fortified with manure. Situated near an oak tree, the pollen and leaves fell day by day, creating a natural layer of compost — potential energy, made manifest by the drop of one thin seed.
I read, a few years back, that squirrels take the acorns they find, and bury them to store for the winter. Their brains are sufficiently small that they inevitably forget some of the acorns they bury; in this way, we get oak trees. Years later I later read that rats, consummate omnivores that they are, are intelligent enough to nibble on a new food, like a mushroom, and connect a stomachache hours later to the mushroom from hours before. The memory it forms at that point is lifelong; this is, incidentally, why rats are so hard to poison.
How incredible, then, to think of that first practitioner of agriculture, who buried this thin seed in the ground, this seed that would hardly sate his hunger. To think that burying this speck he returned to that point, months later; that he connected the dropped flake to the harvest of years to come. How miraculous must this green shoot have seemed?
