Imbolc and everything about spring

[greenstorm]

Let's talk about something very real though: sun is returning. This time of year varies: I see a "warm", I see a "-32C", it's all over in past entries. This time of year is reliably steady: the light is coming back, I catalogue my seeds and start making decisions.

In 2020 I wrote Imbolc isn't spring; it's the evidence-based belief that spring really will come to exist so we should get ready and start planning.

This week I've been shelling the last of my corn. Corn is amazing for breeding for a couple reasons: it tends to outcross, or share pollen with the corn plants nearby to it, so if you want to mix two plants together you can plant them near without doing the kind of fancy tweezers-and-scalpel surgery needed on tomatoes; and if the mother has light coloured outer parts (skin layers, basically) you can see whether it has crossed with a darker pollen-father because the kernel will be a different colour (or sometimes the midlayers of skin).

So shelling corn isn't just gauging yield and admiring the beauty of the crop and evaluating how well it did. Shelling corn, if it's light corn, is also looking to directly see what was crossed and with what. Sometimes there are blue kernels, or red. Sometimes they're blue speckled or red starred. I didn't have original plans to do this but I find myself picking out the crossed kernels. I want to plant them all together and see the diversity that results in that patch: some plants taller or shorter, with redder or more chartreuse stalks or silks, stockier or slimmer, producing a clump of plants from one root or a single reaching stem. I'm almost done shelling (I'd left the corn to dry on the cobs for months stacked in dairy crates to dry) and soon I'll start setting aside the seed in small bags for each plot, then vacuum sealing and freezing the rest.

I'm starting to pull out my tomato seeds. In 2021 I grew a bunch of stuff, it was my first year landracing, and then it got sealed up into the vault because I was moving spring 2022. I kind of forgot about the details of it. Landracing is about adapting a diverse population to a very particular landscape, and in my mind that seed, grown and saved a year in threshold, was no longer adapted to my land since I was moving. Well, I found that 2021 seed and it's already a year adapted to threshold, so this will be its second year in its home! I remember things about it, there's a very sweet tomatillo for example, that I wanted to keep sweet for eating out-of-hand as a fruit. It's like someone gifted a year's work to me. There are all these pepper seeds. There are greens mixes carefully blended to go feral and create a seedbed of edibles.

Outside there are several feet of snow on the ground, 6" of ice on the driveway thanks to the recent warm snap, and it's supposed to snow 40cm. I will not start any transplants until March 1 at the earliest. Still, it's light for an hour after work, I have seeds to sort, and the next month will rush by so quickly.

The light returns.

Comments

[amazon_syren]

You did.
You gifted a year's work to you.

A star-crossed corn plot sounds like fun. It would be neat to see what turned up.

[yarrowkat]

i like that line about Imbolc, that's lovely. it is like that here, too, though we've had a couple days in the 60sF recently, so the sense of "days are warm/ it is spring" is maybe stronger - still the plants know to wait. and we got snow yesterday (half an inch; entirely melted now); the weather could do almost anything at any moment this time of year here too. but the sunset is getting close to 6pm, and that helps a lot.