The Long Way Home
By Autumn Prairie Pumpkins
The coffee was just right this morning. I had it on the back step while the light was still low, watching the garden warm up, and I read something on my phone that I keep thinking about: two humpback whales were tracked crossing more than 14,000 kilometers of open ocean, from the breeding grounds off Australia all the way to Brazil. No instruments. No trail to follow. Just ocean, instinct, and some internal knowing that has been calibrated over longer than anyone can measure.
I put the phone down and looked at the beds. It is spring planting season out here in Newton, Kansas, and there is something about those whales that feels true to what is happening in the garden right now.
Seeds know things too. Not the way a whale does, probably. But there is a directional pull in a seed placed in warm soil, something that was oriented toward upward long before it arrived in your hand. Put it in at the right depth, in soil that has some life in it, and it will find its way. That gets me every time.
What Spring Is Teaching This Year
We are in the thick of May now, and the pumpkin beds are past seedling stage. The vines are running. Some of the moschata varieties are already showing their second true leaves and picking up speed. The Seminole seedlings have that particular determination about them. They look like they already know where they are going.
This spring has been generous in some ways and tight in others. We had a cold spell in late April that had me covering transplants two nights in a row. Then the warmth came back fast and everything shot upward like it was making up for lost time. That is Kansas. You learn to hold your plans loosely and stay flexible when the weather has other ideas.
This time of year I think about permaculture in the practical sense, not the lecture-y one. Work with what the season is doing. The soil tells you things if you pay attention. The way it clumps or crumbles when you squeeze a handful, whether it smells alive, whether the worms are near the surface after a rain. A healthy garden teaches you to slow down and observe before you act, which is not always my natural instinct, but the garden has been a patient teacher.
The Distance a Seed Travels
Those whales, 14,000 kilometers, across open water with no landmarks and no signal except whatever is built into them at a cellular level. Scientists think they may be navigating by the Earth's magnetic field, by star patterns, by water temperature, by the sound of ocean currents. Probably some combination of all of it, woven together over millions of years of crossing the same waters.
A seed travels a shorter distance. From packet to hand to soil. But there is a kind of trust in that act that I find meaningful every spring. You are betting on something invisible. You are trusting that the potential sitting inside that dry, papery shell is real, and that if you put it in the right conditions and mostly get out of the way, it will do what it was made to do.
We carry heirloom varieties from four continents in the shop right now. That still strikes me as something worth sitting with. Seeds that came from the Pacific islands, from the highlands of Japan, from the American South and the French countryside, all growing in the same Kansas clay. Every one of them found its way here. Every one of them is oriented toward the same thing: up, toward the light, into the season.
The Quiet Middle of the Season
May is the quiet middle. It does not have the drama of first planting in April or the harvest anticipation of September. It is the heads-down season. You are watering, watching for pests, adjusting the feeding program as the plants move from vegetative growth into flower. The vines are at that exact transition point right now where you want to back off the nitrogen and let them think about blooming, which is worth understanding if you have not seen it before.
There is a pace to it. You cannot rush it. The whales did not rush either. That kind of crossing takes weeks. You trust the direction, you keep moving, and eventually you arrive somewhere.
I am going to go check the beds in a minute. The squash bugs have been making themselves known, which means it is time for the morning inspection ritual: flip the leaves, check the stems, find and remove any clusters of rust-brown eggs before they hatch. Small actions, repeated consistently. That is really the whole game.
This spring planting season, wherever your garden is, I hope it is teaching you something good. I hope the seeds are running and the soil is warm and that at least once this week, you have had coffee outside and watched something grow.
If you are still looking for seeds, we still have good selection and everything ships free from Newton. The pumpkin fertilizer guide we just published is worth bookmarking too, if your vines are at the flowering stage.
From the patch in Newton, Kansas.
From the patch to your garden