The Joy of Germination
February may not be the cruelest month, but it’s not exactly fun either. By the time February rolls around, everybody is pretty sick of winter. The days have been short for a long time and often the weather is dreary if not downright miserable. If it’s a bad one, the piles of snow are concrete, and probably brown, unless it’s snowed recently. Winter is wearing for everybody, even those of us with adequate food stores. It’s cold and dark, and people are cooped up and get sick all the time.
For many people, Spring begins in April or May when all the flowers start blooming and it’s starting to get nice out. Or it technically begins on March 21st, but it doesn’t feel like it. However, February is actually the beginning of the year’s renewal. February 2 has four holidays associated with it, Groundhog Day, Candlemas, St. Brigid’s Day, and Imbolc It’s the half way mark between Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox. The days have been getting longer and the sunshine stronger and you can observe the effect of this on the natural world. Shadows are shifting, the earliest plants are starting to grow, birds are on the move.
Candlemas and St. Brigid’s Day are Catholic holidays that attached themselves to an older, pre-Christian holiday. St. Brigid is believed to have been the Christianization of an ancient Gaelic goddess, Brigid. Imbolc is Brigid’s holiday, an ancient pagan festival celebrating the birth of lambs and the beginning of spring. The etymology of the word Imbolc has been traced back to various Proto-European roots and may mean milk, cleansing, and budding. Groundhog Day came to us through the Pennsylvania Dutch and is believed to come from a similar German festival involving badgers and bears, which can also be part of Imbolc ritual and lore. Basically Feb. 2 represents the relief that northerners feel when the days start getting longer and warmer after the harsh days of winter.
I learned about St. Brigid’s Day a few years ago when I wanted to have a ritual marker for the seasonal shift represented by Groundhog Day, the official kick off, in my mind, of the gardening season. I came to the astronomical significance of Groundhog Day through my own observations of the changes in the natural world and by the need to start onion seeds really early. There was no ritual for me to follow for this powerful day, groundhogs, as a symbol, are a little blah. But wonderfully, Brigid has a cross that is used ritually in Ireland on her day. And you can buy them on Etsy, so for the past 6 years I have been ordering them and hanging a fresh one to guard against fire, lightening, illness and evil spirits.
At the beginning of Thor Hanson’s book, The Triumph of Seeds, he talks about his son, who was born with an affinity for seeds. From a very young age he loved seeds and even at one point (when still quite small) defined everything as seeds or no seeds. Reading this, I gained greater insight into how we are born with these affinities to aspects of the world and our affinities come out as intense interest. I was lucky that many of my affinities were aligned with my parents’ (which speaks to it being genetic) and that they allowed me to follow my own interests from a very young age. How appropriate that a person who would write a book about seeds would have a child fascinated by seeds.
My love of seeds, like Thor’s son, began at a young age. When I was five, I planted some sunflower seeds in a window box and was blown away when they sprouted. In the second grade, because of some vestige of an old program that probably started in the Victory Garden years, the teacher handed out a seed ordering sheet and we could buy packets of seeds, for 25 cents! And I still remember the thrill of getting all those packets of seeds, even though they were little brown envelopes with just names on them and not pictures.
Seed starters have to figure out how to make seeds germinate and it starts with reading the seed packets. It’s sometimes hard to understand the backs of packets, and they don’t always tell you everything you need to know. In my opinion, to get optimal germination you have to know its light/depth needs and the right temperature. But there are other important details that won’t be obvious to a beginner. Such as, some seeds need to be scarified, or frozen or chilled a few times, before they will germinate. Seed starting is like a magic spell - plant 1” deep, in soil 72 degrees warm, keep moist, expose to light and voila! In 3-4 days a plant will appear!
The best part of seed starting, in my opinion, is the germination. Seeds are so mysterious, they’re enigmas. These little stones, particles, dust, when placed in soil in the right conditions, turn into plants. The spark of green life that pokes up from the soil always fills me with joy. And then they grow into amazing plants, all different. One of the annuals that I grow yearly is the Tithonia. It goes from a seed the size of a sunflower seed to 7 feet tall and wide with hundreds of orange flowers, in one season. And hummingbirds, butterflies, bees, and birds love it (and rodents too, but that’s another story).
One of the things I love so much about plants is their logical nature. There are physical variations in the environment and they react and adapt to those variations in predictable ways. Certain plants without enough light grow thin and stretched out. Other ones love it and grow thick and lush. Some plants thrive in a puddle, others instantly rot. They are in tune with the physical world, following light, water, geological conditions, their niche. And if you get even deeper, pants form communities with others species of plants. They create conditions that other plants adapt to.
Plants are also fascinating because of their connections to other species, including us. In all domesticated plants, there is a long history of human selection. People have been genetically manipulating plants for millennia. Who was the first person who figured this out, or was our species born with this ability? Did we start out unconsciously selecting some plants over others? When we collected grain, we would naturally harvest bigger over smaller, and easier to pluck than harder to pluck. And then when we planted seeds they would naturally and accidentally be the bigger and easier to pluck ones. And on it would go.
Learning more about the history of St. Brigid’s Day and Groundhog Day made me think about how these traditions and rituals travel through humanity for a very long time. People many thousands of years ago felt that this point in the cycle of year was important: lambs were being born and animals were moving around, the frozen earth started to thaw. Some birds arrive, others depart and buds swell, all the signs point to the beginning of the growing time.
Even though I am sitting in the most luxurious man made environment, indoor plumbing, central heating, electric lights, refrigerator, supermarkets, modern medicine, even though civilized humans have long denied their connection to the natural world, we still feel these tides. Me and many, many other gardeners have been stimulated to get their seeds together and if not actually start them, certainly think about when to start them (and what to grow - oh what to grow!). It is a quietly joyful time, the world is filled with so much possibility.