We planted some seed and starters in my home garden this weekend. Here in Oregon, the growing season is long and these plants will come to maturity late in the fall. Tending our backyard plot is a drastically different task than that of tending full sized fields, both in scale and technique. Pests and weeds that you can ignore in your home garden must be carefully prepared for and managed when you are farming a field for production.
But as I looked at our garden last night, this collection of little green sprouts got me thinking about how the act of planting is an essentially hopeful one. I am waiting eagerly (anxiously?) to see how our at-home plantings progress and hoping that we’ll have some edibles come fall. It seems so incredible that these tiny hardened seeds become tender little sprouts that will grow, flower, and fruit into something many thousands of times its original size.
Even with all the knowledge that our farm team possesses and the preparation they go through in the winter, we still must work in concert with nature — we make predictions and we respond to what really comes our way in the natural world. Tracking the progress of our crops is a huge task accomplished by a team of field scouts and farm managers. Digital photographs are visual data that inform our farming techniques, and soil testing tells us what nutrients are present (and lacking) so that we can see with great precision how to prepare the soil for the needs of a crop.
Despite these and other very precise farming methods at Stahlbush, those orderly sprouts poking up through the ground and reaching for the sunshine are always a joy and a surprise in their own way — though they are expected they are still newcomers, and we can delight in the newness, the greenness, the fragility that demands we welcome them with care. To me they are the reward of an optimistic and hopeful enterprise.
