When I first start planting vegetables, it is in the comfort and warmth of my kitchen as early March is too cold to start seedlings outside. I retrieve dusty plastic trays from my greenhouse and wash them, mindful of any pathogens that could be remaining from the prior year. Sometimes Charlotte helps me start the season enthusiastically as she did this year on a visit. I try to bring in the soil from the outside cold a few days early so it is not a shock to the seeds or our hands.
But the soil we use is not soil in a natural state but one that is manufactured. It is sterile and with the addition of a few trowels of manure and tablespoons of kelp, nutritious. And while I would never use anything else to start my seedlings, I feel as if I am missing an essential element of planting seeds. It is the element of randomness and the chances you take every time you plant something outside.
This week I transplanted early seedlings and seeded my first crop of carrots, radishes and peas. The soil was warm and already needed a preliminary weeding as baby dandelions and other unwanted plants were making a growth sprint to claim their place in my garden. Half a bag of dehydrated manure gets added to the bed and now scrunched down like a frog I start to lay out my rows.
There is little sign of activity in the soil. The slugs, worms and other bugs seem uninterested for now in finding their way to the surface. Gnats, however, are not nearly as shy and swarm around my face looking for a place to land. I have come to accept them rather than attempt to fend them off in a wild frenzy of hand waving and head shaking. Like cows or horses in the field, I accept their presence with an occasional swipe toward one that may be feasting on my body.
An old chopstick is my plow to separate the soil and create a thin groove where I will drop my seeds. As my fingers are too chunky and calluses too thick for all but the largest seeds like peas, I need a hand seed sower to deposit the smaller ones into their rows. Patient and continuous taps deposit the seeds into their place though I realize that they will sprout irregularly because of my inability to better control their flow into he soil.
Charlotte needs not such prosthesis as her fingers are tiny and sensitive. She looks intently at the handful of radish seeds I hold in front of her and one by one picks one up and puts it in its place. So still I am removed from the soil. Only when I cover them by waving my hands over the soil do I touch the earth. So after Charlotte and I finish putting the seeds to bed we both let the soil linger on our hands as we go inside for a drink.
