Greenstorm's Journal

A little rambly since it's written spur of the moment and not edited

Landrace Gardening in Fort St James: the new way, the old way, and the local way

(baby apple picture)

This is a picture of year 1 of my ten-year apple project. Yes, I’m breeding my own apples! Yes, I’m planning something that won’t bear fruit (pun intended) for a decade! How did I get to this point?

When I moved to Fort St James from the coast I couldn’t grow any of my favourite tomatoes. I’d always grown fancy tomatoes and I wasn’t going to let the short, cool summers here stopped me. No one bred interesting, colourful, fancy-tasting tomatoes for the north. Covering my whole garden with greenhouse was far too expensive so I had to get creative. Literally, creative.

Lucky for me I discovered landrace gardening, otherwise known as evolutionary plant breeding or, to our ancestors, just good seed saving and growing technique. Modern landrace gardening is a powerful technology based in creating a pool of genetic diversity, then co-selecting along with your local conditions to create truly customized, locally-adapted species that will grow well in your own garden, under your own preferred cultivation methods.

(squash diversity picture)

The steps are easy:

1. Save your seeds! If a plant is successful enough to set seed in your garden it will probably do well there. If you grow your own saved seed every year, every year your plants will become more adapted to your garden.

2. Celebrate diversity, encourage cross-pollination! Traditionally when we save seeds we get rid of the unusual ones. This time the unusual ones are what we want! The broader your genetic base (the more different varieties you start with) and the more they cross, the more chances your garden creates for you to find a winning combination of taste and hardiness. If you select for cross-pollinating flowers that pollinators seem to love you’re helping yourself out in the future and helping the ecosystem.

3. Encourage selection by the local ecosystem! Yes, many of us baby our transplants, starting our peppers in February. Yes, it’s hard to let plants die. But if you don’t put out frost cloth, as long as not all the plants die, the ones that survive will be better able to survive the cold. If you water a little less and half your plants die, the ones that survive to set seed are more likely to be drought resistant. If you don’t battle the bugs, next year your surviving plants should be just a little more resistant. I’m harvesting tomatoes from my fields without any coverings.

4. Select for characteristics you value! This is your garden, you can grow what you want. I not only like multi-coloured tomatoes, I also don’t like to stake my tomatoes. I let them grow on the ground and only harvest those held up away from the dirt. Over time my plants oblige. I’ve heard of people adapting cold-night 4-lb aromatic cantaloupes and thick, high-eared raccoon resistant corn. Keep seeds only from the best-tasting and the plants will soon suit your palate. Keep seeds from fruits and plants that are beautiful, just because.

5. Share your seeds! Share your seeds with your neighbours so you can both increase your level of diversity and adaptation! Share your seeds because you’re proud of what you’re doing. Share your seeds to help people who can’t access food in these hard times get healthy food for themselves. Share your seeds because plants make lots of seeds and it will help you clear off your shelves!
(baby potato or fava picture)

This is my third year landrace gardening. I have several dry corns for winter, a group of outdoor colourful tomatoes, lovely frost-hardy fava beans, and a beautiful, variable squash that grow from direct-seeding in the Fort.

This year I’m starting projects too: potatoes from actual seeds, working on my idea of a perfect lettuce, and refining a fruit-salad tasting tomatillo. I’m also growing apples. A breeder in California, Steven Edholm, has had success selecting his own apples from carefully chosen parents. In landrace style I’m following his lead: planting 270 diverse seedling apples into a hedgerow this year. Aside from making sure they’re watered and not eaten by voles I’ll leave them for 7-10 years. At that point they’ll start fruiting. It’s likely some of them will survive our winters that long and will taste good. Then I’ll have a northern apple truly suited to me, perhaps as my own retirement present!

(corn diversity picture)

If you’re interested in learning more about landrace gardening we’re starting a garden club in Fort St James (facebook: Fort St James Gardeners will find us) and there’s an international community with free courses and forums at goingtoseed.org. Plus I’m always happy to chat about gardening and share seeds!

(If there is a projector screen, put a set of randomized landrace pictures on it while I'm talking, changing every 20-30 seconds, and say: "I brought some eye candy for the talk: everything you see up there was produced using this growing method I'm about to talk about, most of it in very difficult conditions. We all need eye candy at this time of year, right?")

I want to warn you up front, I have a bit of a tomato bias. I'll try not to make every example about tomatoes. What I'm about to say is common to the way I grow and think about many different kinds of seeds though.

Do you remember trying to buy seed for spring 2020? Catalogues sold out so early, every catalogue, and what used to be joyful anticipation of spring gardening turned into competition and sometimes despair as everything you wanted disappeared?

You know when you plant some seeds so hopefully, maybe that new beautiful tomato, and there you are with blankets at the end of the year trying to protect it from frost-- and every single fruit is still green?

Have you ever thought maybe you'd save seed, but then realized that if you wanted to do it the recommended way, everything would need to be so far apart you'd need a dozen gardens?

You know that feeling when you've gone down the seed catalogue and you want the corn that looks like jewels *and* the corn that is bright orange *and* the blue sweet corn, or you want the purple stripey tomato *and* the yellow-and-blue one *and* the tiny red one on a huge vine *and* the one so dark it looks almost black *and* the super early one *and* the multicoloured one that's supposed to taste so good *and* the neat-shaped cherry one that looks almost silver because variety is fun and amazing, but then you look at the total of your seed cart and it's a thousand dollars and you only would plant one plant from each packet and suddenly having fun with this hobby feels so expensive?

Yeah. Me too. All of those.

First I wanted to grow every tomato, but I didn't have space or money. I lived on the coast then, and I just rotated the tomatoes I grew. It was fun.

Then I moved up here. You know what happens when you're a gardener that moves from the coast to the north, right? You spend a year growing things that don't ripen even a little bit. You think, I need a greenhouse the size of my whole garden. You look at your bank account, and at the cost of greenhouses. And then you adapt.

In my case I didn't want to adapt by growing only tomatoes that do well up here -- both of them bred by Andy Pollock -- and giving up on something new or pretty every year. What was I going to do?

This is when I first heard about Joseph Lofthouse. He lives in super high elevation in Utah, a place where frost can come at almost any time, the nights are cold, and the seasons are short. It's not a place where seeds from the pretty catalogues do well. Sound familiar?

It sounded familiar to me. I found inspiration in the story of how he bred his own varieties to do well on his land, following in the footsteps of Andy Pollock and his persistence, but also with the flair of someone who loves to go out into the garden and pick tomatoes of every single colour. This is what he did:

We know that seeds grown here, from here, probably will do better than seeds from somewhere warm and maybe covered in plastic and even pesticides, right?

We know that organisms, including plants, tend to take after their parents.

This is a hard one, but, we know that if something dies, it probably isn't well-suited for the conditions we're growing it in.

Well, what Joseph did was to get a ton of seeds from all over. He grew all of them, and made sure they crossed: that is, of the ones that survived long enough to provide pollen, that pollen from many different fathers crossed into many different mothers. It's basically the opposite of keeping the variety pure like you're supposed to do in seed saving. It sounded crazy, but it was actually brilliant.

He harvested the seed from that first year. Not many plants did well; there wasn't a ton of fruit, but what he got was crosses of all the survivors. Next year he could grow out that scant handful of seeds, and he got plants that had all the traits needed to survive in his difficult climate-- and mixed in with that, he had traits from any fun and beautiful varieties that survived long enough to provide pollen. Not all of those seeds would survive and flourish but many of them would, and as long as he crossed and then saved what survived they got better every year.

Joseph's climate was rough, and in many cases it was a couple years before he could start to select, not just for what survived, but also for what he liked to eat. From a beginning with no melons that would ripen, where he had to take the melons in and set them on the shelf until the seeds were just barely ripe enough to germinate the next year, he eventually selected a cantaloupe with a rich, strong scent and just the right size for his needs. From a handful of corn kernels that was all that was left of a huge patch after weather being eaten by what seemed like every animal for miles he eventually was growing a beautiful, jewel-like multicoloured corn that was so strong, and held its ears so high, that the raccoons couldn't get to it and they gave up and left him with the whole harvest. He selected one squash that was small and so sweet and tasty that it can be eaten raw, on a platter with carrots and other dippers. He selected another squash that was big, deep orange, tasty, kept well, and-- you know, it ripened for him reliably. No big deal, right? (laughs)

And from an astonishing number of tomato seeds, wild tomato relatives, tomatoes of every shape and size and colour, he decided he didn't like tomatoes. (Rueful smile, laugh). So from tomatoes he selected yellow and orange and multicoloured fruit that weren't the tangy strong tomato taste we love. He didn't select for bland supermarket tomato either, though. With so many different plants in their ancestry, wild ones, weird ones, once he had them ripening reliably he was able to select the flavours he liked to eat: sweet, fruity flavours like... well, I'm going to read you a quote.

"Once I started growing genetically diverse tomatoes, and tasted things like melon, mango, sea urchin, and guava, I abandoned all efforts towards growing red tomatoes. I cull any reds that I find. I don’t save the seeds from reds for sharing with people who love red tomatoes. I don’t want my legacy to be the creation of one more red tomato.

Our taste testing panels consistently choose orange tomatoes as the most tasty."

(Makes a face). I love red tomatoes, but you know, a tomato that tastes like mango or melon sounds pretty magic too. I'm not saying you need or even want to grow a tomato that tastes like sea urchin. I'm saying that maybe you can, not only grow a tomato that ripens in your garden, but maybe you can do that, and you can also have a ton of variety. With this method you're not constrained to what other people like, to what they've already done, you don't have to worry that we're a tiny market here and no one breeds anything interesting for the north. If you want a tomato that tastes like sea urchin-- and one that tastes like melon-- and one that tastes like the best summertime BLT tomato-- you *can*.

And you can do it without competing for the catalogues every spring, and without buying separate seeds any time you want a little variety. And you can do it while sharing with your neighbours-- that makes it even better.

I've talked about how powerful landracing is. I've talked about what it can do to make hardy plants and to make tasty plants. But what is it, exactly?

Well, there are only a couple steps:

1) Save your seeds. Every year that you save seeds from your own yard, or are given seeds from your neighbour, those seeds get more and more adapted to your conditions. They'll do better every year. That's what Andy Pollock did, adapting Early Girl into Pollock.

2) Celebrate diversity, encourage cross-pollination. Usually when you save seeds you try to get rid of the unusual ones, the ones that don't look like they're supposed to. With landracing those unusual ones are where the fun really starts! A plant with two parents that did well is pretty likely to do well itself, and if it's a cross it's also a new variety that you've never seen before. Save it! Grow it! Visit it and enjoy the fact that it's brand new and it's yours. Encouraging pollinators, planting different varieties really close together, even looking at the flowers and saving seed especially from plants with flowers that are friendliest to pollinators-- that means you'll have even more crosses, even more new varieties, and even more chances for the perfect combination of characteristics that's exactly suited to you.

3) Encourage selection by the local ecosystem.
There's something really special about starting those seeds in February or March. About setting up lights, carefully watching those first green leaves come up, about making sure the temperature and water is just right. It's a habit to watch the weather forecast and mother's day and the full moon and try to decide, do I plant now, or a little later? Do I need to run out with blankets, or put row cover over everything? In an especially cool year, or for a lot of us in a normal year, we try to find space in the greenhouse or cover everything in hoophouses or spend every day watering in the dry year. We baby our plants. We love them, and we want those fancy tomatoes, so we try to make sure every single one has the best conditions and will survive. Even if it takes so much work on our parts.

One of the hardest parts of landracing is letting plants die. Yes, really. We try a wide range of seeds because who knows? But in order for the seeds we save to be better every year, to be hardier every year, we need to let the ones that aren't hardy die.

The first year it feels like you're the worst gardener. It feels like your neighbours are judging you and the ghosts of that 105-day tomato plant is hovering around your head filling you with regret. But that's how you get plants that most likely will grow better next year. That's how you get seeds that spring out of the soil at the end of March, maybe get transplanted into a light frost, and still somehow thrive and hand you baskets of tomatoes by July 1 even though there's a drought. You let the ones that die in cool evenings or drought or too much rain die. You keep the ones that love your garden, so that every year they love your garden more.

4) Select for characteristics that you value

Once your plants are surviving, it's not just surviving you select for. How do you like to garden?

I mean, definitely taste everything and save seed from the tastiest, whatever that means to you. Do you like sea urchin taste? Do you HATE sea urchin taste? (laugh) I'm joking, but really, taste everything before you save seed and you'll get a landrace tailored exactly to what you like-- even if what you like is a huge range of flavours.

Don't like weeding every day? Select the plants that grow well even if you leave weed pressure. There's nothing in my garden that can't compete well with lamb's quarters, let me tell you. Love weeding? You'll get plants that thrive in that bare soil. Or do you love companion planting? Do it, and over time you'll get plants that do well with your favourite companions.

I don't trellis my tomatoes, I just pick the ones I can see. Joseph is the same way, and over time his tomatoes have started to hold their fruits up above the soil where they're visible, since those are the ones that get picked and tasted and saved for seed. Meanwhile my 11-year-old self, who used to grow tomatoes up the side of the house, would have selected for the longest vines with the least side-shoots and over time that little kid would have got easy-trellising tomatoes.

Do you grow in pots because your soil is awful? You're selecting for what does well in pots. Soon you'll have a container landrace!

Select for beauty. I know so much of my joy comes from a beautiful basket of every colour of tomatoes, or that perfect blue colour in squash, but I also love that pinky-tan squash with just a little hook by the stem and that football-shaped one that's so easy to peel. I put my corn in jars in winter on a shelf just so I can admire it. Do you love a rainbow of produce? Do you love only orange corn, or tomatoes? Do you love THE ORANGEST or THE BLACKEST corn or tomatoes? Select those and over the years they'll get more intensely beautiful for you.

Really, you can select for anything you like that you see in your plants, and if you select for it every year you'll likely get more and more of that thing. Your landrace will shape to the way you like to garden, to whether you like to transplant (there's a guy in Montana working on direct-seeded tomatoes. Montana! Direct seeded!) to whether you like to mulch or water or... anything.

This is a partnership with the plants, a relationship you're entering into, where you care for them and save the seed and in turn every year they get closer to what exactly you want.

Cross pollination is a good one to select for because it offers more options later on. With some plants that have difficulty crossing on their own, like tomatoes, it can even make sense to select for the ones that cross best even if they don't have other attributes you love, so that the offspring cross better in the future and you end up with more choices down the road.

5) Share your seeds.

Share your seeds because if you do this with your neighbours you'll have more variety to select from as they share seeds with you.

Share your seeds because you're proud of what you're doing and so many of them are beautiful. share your seeds because someone just said "you can't grow corn here" and you want them to take your corn seed home, plant it, and be proven wrong.

Share your seeds so you can discover that your neighbour secretly likes tomatoes that taste like sea urchin when they share the seeds back with you.

Share your seeds because we all need to be fed, and if you have seeds that grow well here it's an easy way to help people out in these difficult times.

Share your seeds because a tomato has 100-300 seeds in it, and a squash has 50-100, so if you're saving your seeds like you're supposed to it's the only way to prevent your seed collection from taking up your whole house.

Landracing is big, and there's lots of stuff I didn't mention: nutrient density, less fertilizer use, risk vs reward for the first couple years, how many of my plants are going to die and do I really need to let them die? If you're interested there's a forum where people who do this talk endlessly about what they're doing and share seeds. I'm also happy to talk aboutany of that afterwards at the table with anyone who'd curious, but in the meantime: does anyone have any questions?

(if no:

Okay, I have a question for you: if you were going to make a landrace, if you were going to have a nice variety of something that did well in your garden that you'd previously thought couldn't be grown here, what would it be?)

(if appropriate: ask for interest, set up seed stewards)

(Goodness my presenter's voice is colloquial)

I was invited to infodump about my favourite topic today. I responded with this:

I like plants, especially edibles, and especially temperate and cold/temperate edibles, especially growing in ways that genetics and combination on the landscape contribute to carefully-chosen system goals, especially heterogenous varieties eg modern landracing (or old landraces, I'll take 'em all!), especially if those goals are non-conventional (eg not 'how much land can we farm with the fewest people but the most gas and tractors' but more to optimize for human power or climate or the particular site's water or soil or aspect or or), especially if animals are involved in that small human-designed ecosystem, especially if it's allowed to evolve through propagation and selection over time, especially if the surplus that humans take from that system is optimized for local community use including aesthetic preferences and values as well as flavour, comfort, etc, especially if those surplus foods (but also fibre etc) is aligned with cultural use and preservation practices, plus I enjoy learning those use and preservation practices including charcuterie, brewing, canning, drying, annd fermenting. But sometimes I go on a kick and grow a monstera or my grandma's spider plant or fifty kinds of hot pepper just for fun and I keep a bunch of geese and cats and dogs and an old hen around as pets even if they're not contributing to my system. Oh, and I love love love plant variety trials; I live where the only domestic plants that grow reliably are from the old Siberian breeding programs so I need to trial and breed my own varieties (it's super cool here over the summer so nothing ripens, and it's -40C in winter so any perennials die).

Last year I trialled 24 varieties of corn including my heart-corn (gaspe) and discovered some new ones that do well here and I'm going to landrace them, and I made a a surprisingly successful squash grex, and I'm growing a bunch of tomatoes that a collaborator outcrossed to wild relatives to try and get the flowers to cross-pollinate more and thus allow more natural geneflow within the population so I don't have to make a million hand-crosses (tomatoes don't naturally cross much). I was asked in the group this evening about what kind of plant breeding I was into and kind of saved this up for a more appropriate spot. 🙂

Gaspe corn is knee-high and comes from the gaspe penninsula in Quebec, it's one of the shortest season corns in the world; it's a grain corn and grows about knee-high and fills me with absolute awe and gratitude that so many hands cherished corn from the time it was a grass in south-central mexico, and with love and attention they slowly selected and planted and selected and planted until it was corn, and then selected and planted and selected and planted and it spread into myriad forms across north america, slowly, going at the rate of friendship and sharing and at the rate the plant could adapt over so much time, through forms 20' tall with aerial roots, and then eventually spreading up to Quebec where it was so cold and short-season that it was basically unrecogniseable from not just the original plant but from the intermediate forms. All those people, all that persistence, that cooperatively created this plant that now can come live with me where no modern corn can grow. I love it so much. Also if you want to try growing some grain corn and are serious about it, I have seeds to share. (imagine a sea of green heart emojis)

Alright, so I'm going to have 6000-7000 square feet of garden at Cor Viriditas this summer. The bed is roughly triangular. It's going to take an extended three-sisters planting (corn, squash, beans) with plants I've known to grow well under widely-spaced corn (tomatoes, tomatillos) shade-tolerating greens (lettuce, chard, mache, magenta spreen, shungiku, brassicas, chicories) and some pollinator attractors (calendula, borage, fennel, cilantro). I'm saving back seed from most of this, so if it's a complete failure I can try again next year.

Let's sort out how much seed I need. Generally I'll plant 1-2 seeds per plan desired; because it's a chaos garden I expect germination gaps to be filled in by whatever is close by,

I've collected some short season corns and some PNW corns for this mix: gaspe is my favourite, saskatoon white, saskatchewan rainbow, oaxacan green dent, early riser, new york red, carol deppe's magic manna and cascade ruby gold, lavender parching, painted mountain from six or eight different places, a couple bits from seed trades. My plan is to make three groups: dent, flint, and flour and plant them at each corner of the triangular bed, with sunflowers in-between. There will absolutely be cross-pollination between types but perhaps a little minimized. Within each group the corn plants will be spaced fairly widely to allow undergrowth.

What this means is roughly 1500 square feet each of flour, dent, and flint corn for a total of 4500 square feet of corn. Call it 3 square feet per plant and I'm looking at 500-1000 seeds of each type. The rest of my corn will go in the freezer.

Squash will be almost all maxima, with a corner of pepo out of curiosity (I'm playing with hull-less pumpkins for the animals and trying out a few bush delicatas). Again they're short season, including the buttercup and red kuri that actually ripened last year (hopefully with some cross-pollination), potimarron, north georgia candy roaster (this makes fabulous pickles from the unripe fruits), sundream (super cool resistance/short season), nanticoke, lofthouse mix, lower salmon river, blue hubbard (I love large squashes I can keep in the cool room and chop chunks off as I need them, I'd like to steer in the direction of large), gold nugget (I think the shortest season squash? grows well among corn), a few more kabocha types. They'll be primarily planted into the corn patches, seeds mixed as evenly as possible. Give each squash plant 50 square feet over the 4500 square feet of corn garden and that's 90-180 squash seeds for the garden; the rest go in the freezer.

My landmate is going to start some tomatillos, promiscuous tomatoes, and pepper grexes I've sent her. We should be able to pop those starts in when we seed the bed. I'll have 6 shelves x 3 flats each x 50 cells = 900 plant capacity for starts. 200 will go to peppers, 50 to tomatillos (I have a sweet ground-cherry-tasting one I saved seed for last year), and much of the rest to tomatoes (I sent on my "promiscuous A" good-tasting mix, my orange/red bicolour promiscuous, I think another promiscuous one, and then a bunch of largely self-supporting favourites and open-flower-architecture named cultivars: Brad, Silvery Fir Tree, KARMA purple and KARMA MF, Minsk Early, Uralskiy Ranniy, Mikado Black, Maya & Sion, Grocery store green, I think KARMA miracle and a couple others?). So call it 400 tomato plants? They'll be in amongst the corn, and at the edges of the corn. They'll be smallish when they go in but since everything else is being direct seeded that's likely ok, they'll grow enough that some will not be overtaken and it's those vigorous ones I want to save seed from.

Beans are primarily dry bush, they'll be mixed in the center with the sunflowers, peppers will be to the south side of the sunflowers. There's roughly 6000 - 4500 = 1500 square feet of this moat. Call it 800 square feet of sunflowers at 4 square feet each, that's 400 sunflower seeds if planted 2 in each hole (I don't fully trust some of my older seed, though I suppose I could start these indoors too and just put out 200 plants). Beans are 1/square foot, 200 square feet. I'll put a dozen or two melon plants on the south side of the sunflowers in a patch with the peppers. I'll have 200 pepper plants in total, roughly (100 hot grex, 100 sweet grex) that don't really get their own space but instead go in amongst the center.

Aforementioned leafy greens and some roots (beet and turnip grexes, fall radishes, salsify) will be scattered throughout for imediate weed suppression, creating a seed bed, and immediate harvest throughout the spring/early summer.

This is the most hands-off gardening I've ever done and I think it'll be educational as to the new property. It's been awhile since I worked with light as a limiting factor. I expect plenty of things to be shaded out; the seed from what remains will be good for this kind of mixed underplanting. In year 2 I'll move this mix to rotational pig fields, using the saved seed, to help supplement my hog feed through fall and winter.

Nowadays people apologise for loving me in the way that I love other people. Thy say, sorry I don't contact you more. They say, sorry it went so long when we didn't talk.

Before people said to me, if you really loved me you wouldn't see other people. If you really loved me you'd ask for permission before you kissed someone. If you really loved me you'd set other people aside (I guess that's the test of "real love", being willing to give up the fake ones)

That's all a work in progress. But before all that there's another love.

In the last little while I've found community on the internet. People I'd only read about, people who had put their hands on the genes of my favourite varieties, are there forming communities and posting in forums and making podcasts. Today I listened to a podcast where someone wrote in and asked, how would you advise a high school student to become a plant breeder? He answered, at length, listed some books, said to hone observation, said to get started. He was not condescending. He was straightforward. The whole time I thought, where have you been all my life?

Later on I read someone's post on clearing out their spare room and setting up a pepper grow station. Somewhere else a commenter mentioned the beauty of a particular tomato's blossom. A celebrity in this kind of thing said he breeds, among other things, because he's an animal that likes certain tastes and he wants to be able to experience them. The whole time I was reading I thought, I love you, I love you, I love you.

My whole life I have never had the right kind of love. Love is my animating force; it is a holy gift; it is what I was made to do. I notice things and I love them.

I've always loved plants; I've never really been around people who also loved them. I've been around people who gardened because things were neat, or as a means to an end, or because it was relaxing. It's only recently, reading about how Indigenous seedkeepers bring the concept of relationship with a plant, of plants as relations, that I've heard whispers of myself echoed in humans.

And now there are people who do this and it seems to also be a part of their lives and of their hearts. Curiosity and love and exploration and the joy of creation move them. They also give up chunks of conventional life in favour of this work.

There's no way for me not to love anyone who does this. For so long I couldn't love anyone in this way. But.

So much of my love is turned away because I'm not doing it right. Love is a supposed to be channelled in a particular way in our society. This isn't about sex. It's not about children, honeymoons, getting married, whatever it is that I'm not bothering to look up on the list of romantic relationship elevator characteristics. It's not ok to bring love to the table if I'm not bringing these other things; it's not real love if I don't bring these other things. I can't bring love to someone who's married, to someone I don't want to fuck, to someone of the wrong age or gender. And honestly I am complete shit at differentiating between how I'm supposed to love and how I'm not, let alone doing it properly.

So after whispering I love you under my breath I hesitate to reply to a message. I dampen the shining in my eyes and remove the heart emoji and the exclamation point from the keyboard. I sit the night to let emotion seep away. I don't want people to see how shabby my love is, how something so inconsequential lights me up. I don't want people to think I'm doing it wrong because I don't want them to go away.

I guess I've been trained well.