Greenstorm's Journal

It's time to begin inventorying my seeds.

Every year is another spreadsheet; I'd once thought I could have one spreadsheet for the garden and a couple columns for each year.

Then, I thought, maybe a tab for each category but still an enduring sheet (tomatoes. brassicas and greens. circubits. though non-overlapping categorization is hard).

Then, last year, one sheet for the annuals through one year, a tab per category.

Now, I start one sheet for 2022 with a tab for a simple list of carryover seeds and a simple list of incoming seeds that will no doubt be reworked into categories. We'll see how it shapes itself.

Annuals need a bunch of information: when did I buy the seed and from where? Do I plant it indoors, and if so when? When was it transplanted outside? What kind of food is it? If I plant it outdoors, when? Which garden is it going into? Am I doing any breeding work with it? When did it start producing? How many days to maturity does that make it? How much did it produce? When did it stop producing, when was it killed by frost? Did I save any seed? If I did, what are the likely parents? What was the plant growth habit? Do I want to grow it again? Was it particularly pest-susceptible?

Once I know what I have (I think I'll have at least a hundred varieties of tomatoes this year between trades, saved seed, and carryover seed) I'll need to decide what else to buy and what I'll actually put in the ground (tomatoes that didn't ripen last year will probably not be grown again, for instance).

I'd like to vacuum seal everything by planting date, so I can pop open Feb, March, and April's seeds just like that and have them all in one place.

It would be nice to sometime figure out how to organize all this in a very dry, cool place where I can access what I want, but that seems optimistic.

Meantime it's dreaming time. I'll plant a couple indoor tomato seeds and sort.

Two years, seven months and a scattering of days ago my house became mine. My journaling was so sparse then I didn't record the day. Work had ground down the part of me that writes, and the part of me that observes myself and self-regulates.

Now, well. My home. Threshold. I wrote on someone's post that my farm is the partner I live with. Then I looked out the window and smiled and felt how I imagine someone who's been married for years and made an exceptionally good partner choice must feel: happy, pleased, lucky, and with the deep warmth that lingers when beginning-excitement fades. The statement was almost true. Threshold is the partner I live with.

So many humans identify themselves as half of a partnership, incomplete without a loving relationship. Others say they're whole on their own, as an individual. Yet others consider themselves part of a human network, one piece in a complete social context.

My land is my other half. In it I am complete. Its body and my body are interwoven, shared over the years. My thoughts are never far from it; my mind shapes it and it shapes my thoughts and my understanding of the world. It gives me such varied and beautiful challenges and I live up to potential I never thought I'd have. I give it my sweat, my time, my love, my thought, my occasional spilled blood, and the work I am able to do with my body as it slowly ages.

This is why I speak of being nonhuman sometimes. I am so deeply partnered in a way that no human speaks of, and my other half isn't even a describable object but is instead a set of processes that will exist long after my ashes are scattered on it. There are mythological worlds in which dryads are half-tree half-person and those don't feel mythological to me: they are the only narrative I know that acknowledges my reality.

My farm is on my land, it is part of Threshold but it isn't the land itself. It's a system I use to interact with the land. It's a game we play with each other and a way we support each other: Threshold feeds me with plants and animals and something to plan, I feed it with organic matter and biodiversity and a little bit of fossil fuel-driven machinery. The farm could move with me should I leave this marriage and seek another parcel of land: it would change to reflect the nuances of that new space. The land can never move with me, nor would I want it to.

Threshold will remain here, as itself, until the sun swallows the earth. I can't tell you how reassuring it is that my beloved is nigh-immortal.

And I can't tell you how happy I am to be part of it.