Thoughts from the garden

At the beginning of my winter gardening class, the instructor gave us a few factoids that he said would blow our minds if we really thought about them, that are so fascinating and world-shifting they can keep you up at night. One was that there are more microorganism cells in your body than there are human cells in your body, and the other was about how when they reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone, one change in the ecosystem led to another until the rivers had been rerouted.

Those are definitely cool, but the real mind-blowing moments came for me the other night when we were learning about starting plants from seed.

1. You can't have seedlings in 24-hour sunlight - they need some hours of darkness to grow. The rest is when the growing happens. This makes a lot of intuitive sense to me, and I know there's a good and easily Google-able scientific explanation, but I hadn't given it much thought before.
2. If you leave your seedlings inside for too long, even if they're plants that are supposed to thrive in the heat and the sun, when you take them outside, the first hot day can kill them because they're just not used to it. Even plants get stuck in their comfort zone.

I like the life lessons there. You need periods of rest to grow; you can't just be going going going. And you can get too comfortable with where you are and miss out on someplace where you'd really thrive.

But more than that, it just blew my mind to realize–really realize–that plans are living things. It's almost like they have personalities. They sleep and they get used to their environments and set expectations.

Which is all to say that I may as well just go eat some barbecue because everything is alive.