The Cottagecore Coder

Year three of gardening and I'm finally getting good yields. I'm also getting good yields from my coding. Too good of yields! Ai makes coding so fast, it's way too easy to add features. But year three of gardening is about the magic of seeds.

I'm now confident enough that I can grow stuff, that I'm taking the time to begin saving seeds.

THE FAIL:

Alas, my first attempt at saving seeds from my "dong tree" - my Chinese eggplant bush that made the most delicious, perfectly sized eggplants for two-person dishes - failed. I figured I'd just try removing them from the eggplant and leaving them out to dry, but was too lazy/busy to look up how to best save seeds.

Apparently, with wet seeds there's a whole process. With eggplant, you're supposed to wait until the fruit is overripe, hard, and shriveled on the plant before you start collecting its seeds. With wet seeds, you generally need to put the seeds in a bowl of water to get the pulp off them. Then you strain them, pat them dry, and spread them on a tray. The drying process may take two to four weeks!

Yeah, I did none of that. Damn, it was the best eggplant, a random eggplant from Home Depot seedlings. The eggplant I have this year is ok, so I likely won't try again - it's also not as high-producing as the eggplant seedling I had last year. Only 3 dongs, sigh.

Magic #1 about seeds - you can pick the best plants to save their seeds. The hardiest, best growing, most delicious, whatever property you're optimizing for. I'm astonished at the incredible varieties of plants especially where it's clear communities of people intentionally bred them over time. I hope to try all the kinds of potatoes in Peru someday! I'm so grateful to Native American people for squash. And African people for watermelon!

Omg this summer I discovered fresh watermelon juice, run through a masticating juicer, is UNBELIEVABLY DELICIOUS. I had no idea. It's so much better than biting into a watermelon. Concentrated flavor. There's little waste pulp with watermelon, it nearly entirely juices. 10/10 would recommend.

Last thing I'll say about eggplants - My pet peeve about eggplants at the grocery stores is they are so massive that they're for a family of six, or someone who is good about freezing ready made meals. Which I should do anyway, as our household is trying to reduce plastics as much as possible, yet we still eat commercial frozen lunches.

THE MOST MAGIC:

At a conference of the Northeast Organic Farmers Association, I picked up some seneca cornstalk beans from the free seeds table. That was the most wholesome, calm conference I've ever been to. If there's an organic farmers association near you, go, it was wonderful, great people. I even learned about a farm near me that teaches all kinds of useful crafts from practical metal and woodwork, to food growing workshops, even draft animal plowing. I took a week-long workshop there with Kathy Hatori of Botanical Colors, to pop my natural dye cherry. It demystified everything and got me over the hurdle of not knowing how to navigate all the steps and information out there.

I've only ever grown green beans before, so the fact that after the growing season, I had 10 times more beans than what I put in the ground, was literally magical. It's less obvious with something tiny like basil, is all.

Hear me out, you can stick a seed in the ground and……. a few months later it has multiplied and you have more of it. Actually, you now have a lifetime supply of that seed. Forever. That's it.

That's even more magical to me than how I'll never stop being in wonder that you can pull a plant up by it's roots, then plug it into the ground somewhere else like it's an electrical socket and it just keeps growing. That's so mindblowing.

I haven't eaten the beans yet but the seneca cornstalk bean plant itself is gorgeous and hardy AF. The leaves are fuzzy-sticky like soft velcro which is also fun.

SYMBIOSIS

Alright, jokes and self-deprecation aside, I had a profound realization this year. I've been walking on this trail along the river. There's silt/sand on the trail, so it's easy to go barefoot. I've taken workshops with a few herbalists over the years and consider myself an amateur herbalist. One thing herbalists will say is that the medicine you need is often growing right around you.

There's a plant here with yellow flowers that's good for treating prostate issues, that I recognize but can't remember its name. One needs to consult a clinical herbalist to use it, because too much of it is toxic. But it's quite common and I see it growing in my neighborhood along the edges of sidewalks. It's been hanging on my mind because prostate challenges are so common, and I've been chewing on the idea that the medicine you need is often growing around you.

On a walk one day, with a beautiful breeze caressing my skin, bare feet on the ground, a wave of realization washed over me. I thought about co-evolution, and wondered if medicinal plants intentionally find their way to people who have an illness they can help, because there is a chance they will be cultivated and have greater chance of survival and growth.

Now, a plant can't walk on its own, but its seeds can be carried by animals or wind. I believe plants have their own form of sentience, as do fungi. A plant's sensory system on its own might not stretch very far. I'm sure it has some level of chemical / biochemical signaling and sensing, as well as touch. Its roots have information processing and sensing, the water in it has its own sentience or messaging transmission. Wind brings chemicals across the air. And I believe our bodies biochemically signal with the plants around us.

Aside: It's my pet peeve about "mental health" science because so much of it, at least twenty years ago when I read a lot of scientific literature about it, was about the brain as a contained unit, separate from the gut, separate from the social and environmental surroundings, no mention of the greater picture of biochemical and hormonal signaling going on outside of and in interconnection with the brain. It's a great misnomer and disservice to people, especially as more discoveries are made about the interconnection of gut and the physical health of the rest of your body, and environmental toxin issues that can cause imbalance, let alone like duh tons of people are depressed, society is fucked up and school is a horrifying boredom for most people, whether you're smart, "dumb", or in between.

Lastly, fungi between the plants carry messages across species, across much longer distances under the soil. So I wondered, can medicinal plants actually sense that, say a person has a lung issue, through this sophisticated web of intercommunication, and then move themselves, very slowly :), toward that person, on the chance that their survival outcomes are enhanced by them coming together? It's not like a plant has a self-reflective brain or consciousness in the way humans do, but I believe they have enough sensory capacity with the other elements and kingdoms of life to sense to come near.

I'd often heard that the medicine you need is growing around you, but I'd never thought about the mechanisms of play of that, in detail. It was a beautiful meditation and I will hold it to be possibly true, because it's wondrous to consider and brings me into more respectfulness with the web of life I depend upon and delight in.

Enjoy, pictures of some of the plants I've grown this year, and their seeds I'm collecting for the first time. I has infinite basil, seneca beans, and rainbow celosia flowers so far!

Celosia flowers are Dr. Suess pastel rainbow floofy floof ridiculousness. These pictures aren't mine, but they look like this. My partner was mystified and delighted that these exist :).

EDIBLE WILD YARD (you know you want one):

If I wanted to intentionally plant purslane, an edible weed, I could have infinite purslane as well. I harvested it for soup recently and I was like "wait, I thought I washed this" - there were soooooo many seeds in it I thought it was dirt! Tiny tiny black seeds. I've been eating purslane and lesser burdock from our yard as well, both also wild/weed plants. Lesser burdock is not as delicious and flavorful as "greater burdock" but it's still nice in moderation. Burdock is often used in herbal medicine as a nervine, liver detoxifier, anti-inflammatory, anti-mutagenic, antioxidant, diuretic, and hypoglycemic, among other things. It's a super wonderful plant and imo way more delicious than a carrot or turnip or parsnip or any other similar shaped root vegetable. You can also eat the stalk when they're young, although I haven't tried that yet. I'm convinced the most delicious foods are not commercially available.

My faaaaaavorite herbal tea blend is burdock, dandelion,gotu kola, bacopa + schisandra berries. (Don't eat herbs without researching well and/or consulting a clinical herbalist. Some herbs are contraindicated with certain conditions, for example.)

I found a false strawberry in my yard! I thought it was a real wild strawberry and I got so excited. Our yard is already literally delicious and medicinal, with clover, ground ivy, and dandelions. Wild strawberries grow along the ground in many places in the Northeast. They are tiny, very sweet, and way more delicious than commercial strawberries, perhaps only because they are so cute and tiny 😆. The ground is literally soft (moss) and sweet in New Hampshire, I love it. Anyway, I used my Seek app because it didn't look exactly like a strawberry, more like a strawberry with the seeds poking outward instead of embedded in the flesh, and the strawberry was pointed upward instead of hanging. Apparently they taste like watermelon. And are considered invasive. But I'm hoping this one's seeds spread so there is yet another layer of delicious in our yard.

In closing, my friend Fred recently suggested I plant a loofa plant. They make great shower and bath cleaning sponges, although I find them a little awkward as dish sponges. Same deal, plant it once, you have infinite sponges for life and never need to buy one ever again. The end.

This post is dedicated to the infinity of deliciousness brought to you by, seeds!

If I may categorize my human sensory system seeking proclivities, through this post I've discovered I definitely optimize for deliciousness!

Love,

Mage