Seeding

Goals, hopes, enough plans so that some of them can go awry.

• My “Tip Jar” is out. This is a discounted annual paid subscription w/mailings.

• Mailings will also be up for individual order in my shop. The first one is here.

• Floral Observer subscriptions are still open! The spring issue is coming together. So many good things will be part of the paper this year: bird trading cards, recipes, hidden pictures. Spring papers will mail the first week of April.

• I’ll be tabling at Pieburgh in Pittsburgh March 15th.

• I’m speaking at the Ann Arbor Library at 6pm on March 27th. It’s free! I’ll be talking about collaboration and sustainable systems for small press.

It’s that time of year again. Things are both too early and too late all at once. I’ve ordered seeds for the garden, traded for some others, brought out what’s saved from last year. Winged beans have been an obsession of mine since a farmer on Instagram shared that they were the top seed he’d recommend for new gardeners in the end times. You can eat the leaves, tubers, and cook the pods fresh or let them dry out as storage beans. They look like tiny bitter melons. The dried beans can be used like soybeans. Even the flowers are edible. Will winged beans solve it all? Stay tuned.

It’s a regenerative year in the garden, a flower year. No building out, fewer nitrates, more restoration through legumes. Things need to rotate, regrow and rest. This is happening in my press as well. Fewer fairs, more talks and residencies, no custom printing, more of my own books, fewer prints, more writing and text-based zines. No new equipment, more dialing in. Heavy pruning for healthy growth. The rule of thumb for fruit trees is that you should cut a third of the tree. That’s a lot.

As I hedge my bets and fruit hopes I got some Charentais cantaloupe seeds. Cantaloupe was a big winner last year. My dream is that these melons, the winged beans and the Thelma Sander squash that I am still eating in from last fall, will take over the longer archway or “portal”. I’ll put some poppies in again, some arugula and spinach in the early days along with some snap peas. We’ve gotten some “Pepperbox” poppies that are supposed to yield particularly nice seeds for eating. Summer bagel brunch dreams abound.

From Southern Exposure Seeds I’ve gotten some “Lion’s Ear” or Klip Daga or “Shrimp Cocktail flowers” as my friend and fellow flower grower Rachel Kobasa calls them. When I visited Rachel’s garden in Maine last September these towers of orange puffs were just the absurdist element I felt my garden needed. I’m getting some Magenta Magic Orach as groundcover. It reminds me of Idaho. I got some Purple Royal Carpet Sweet Alyssum like I do every year. It crawls over the bricks in my walkway and makes my steps up to the house smell like my grandmother’s section of her garden in Oakland from when I was a kid.

I also got my sunflowers from Southern Exposure this year. The Evening Sun Sunflower promises “red, mahogany-red, burgundy, russet-bronze, vivid gold, all in bicolor blends”. Because the 8 feet that these grow is somehow not enough for my partner Felix we’re also getting the Mammoth sunflower seeds. Again. We never learn. These top out at well over 10 feet, and tend to split and snap in summer storms. But “sunflowers, really big ones” are Felix’s one garden obsession every year. The squirrels, goldfinches and I enjoy the mayhem that ensues.

Will this year be the year my hardy kiwis finally fruit? Or my plums? Will we get the new pumps hooked up to our water catchments in anticipation of another dry summer? Will we clear the fenceline of the grapevine and mulberries? Will Japanese knotweed, purple loosestrife or garlic mustard finally invade? Will it be too hot? Too wet? Too dry? Will the temperatures swing too wide? Will flurries of snow come late and shrivel all the pink-popcorn of peach blossoms that have unfurled?

When I think about my press I wonder—will this be the year I finally dial in systems for cutting books? Will the ancient Lenovo connected to the riso finally give up the ghost? Will I run out of juice for Floral Observer right as the project seems dialed in? Will some unforeseen riso-goblin catastrophe befall me?

I know that the hedge at the center of the yard will rain black raspberries. I know I’ll haul in baskets of greets. I know the bats will come out in the twilight to catch the lightning bugs. I know we’ll see monarchs and their caterpillars. I know I’ll spend long mornings crouched over some green somethings in muddy garden clogs, that I’ll have my big sunhat on, a jangling jar of coldbrew, that I’ll feel the familiar ache of all the hope, joy and doom that gardening during climate collapse taps into.

I know that when I hold all four issues of Floral Observer this time next year, packing them up, I’ll feel a swell of pride. I know that when I’m cutting stacks of Soup Library next week I’ll feel….. something. Hopefully not totally devastated that I’ve ruined entire stacks of my beautiful books cutting them. I know that collaborators will surprise, delight, challenge and inspire me. I know that I’ll continue to find ways to support organizers with printing. I know that I’ll feel the very real weight of the moment we’re in. Running a small press during the rise of technofascism makes all the theoretical value of printing manifest.

Gardening requires the same hopeful stewardship that my press does. If I stand at too much of a distance, removed from the work, keeping either of them going makes almost no sense at all. But once I am up to my elbows in the fruits of my labor, deep in the muck I can see that this is the most correct and only choice.