Insusceptible

Moringa Cutting Experiment

I spread seeds across what the students named Mystery, seeds collected year after year, seeds of okra that grow more acclimated to this land with time. This came to me intuitively. Nobody told me this. Sure, I read books about how best to work in communion with the land, but none specifically mentioned the ability for anyone to breed plants. Until now.

Jacob turned me on to Carol Deppe, to how she has written about people throughout the centuries, people whose own fascination has led to trials and experiments, mostly for their own joy. One man rode a bicycle to houses far apart in order to keep separate his bolting broccoli plants, in order that each seed pod might have its own unique characteristics.

There are times when the universe calls out and asks you to go in a certain direction. You are not always sure where this direction will lead. Still you follow.

I keep coming to the heat, to what I have collected so far from what grows right here around my house. I know that what I have to offer is valuable. I know this because I know how fast my plants have fruited. And I know of many options, of letting whatever papaya are meant to survive, survive. 

There is excitement at what I do not know and what I cannot foresee, how I will have a greenhouse with the progeny of my own plants, how the strongest now will be even stronger later. 

Anyone can understand the sense in the plopping of the hundreds of papaya seeds into one pot. Taking the ten strongest seedlings from that pot. Starting plants with those. Rinse and repeat. 

Papaya seeds can be dried and saved, but ash is needed, and as of yet I have not been successful in this. And yet I keep trying. I keep playing. This is the gift of interacting with life.

Right now, there are branches of moringa in the back of my truck. I used a post hole digger to make holes in different spots around the edge of Needle Street. I know that the tops to this cut moringa should be angled, should be kept free of rain. So as the drops dump down, I sit inside and consider how I might feel in the future, when my thousands of plants have spread across the land where I live.

I will say this, that my plants need not go too far, and if they do, say Florida or Texas even, there should be another person like me, one who will do what I have done with the seed so that those plants might know where they live, so that they might acclimate to their new place.

I think of The Grapes of Wrath and I think of the dictionary. I wonder about the exact definition of acclimate. 

Almost all the plants from Mystery have been removed, relocated, and prayed for. The rain stopped me in the middle of taking more. I wanted to move okra, to make my baby stew in September, even to take the remaining roselle for tea over the winter, to bring to my mother, to drink in front of the fireplace.

There is a give and take, between letting go and taking care of what you have. There is a working within what already happens. There is a glance, a glistening, twenty or thirty glowing orange dwarf tamarillo, free from bugs, bright and sweet like the sun. And so these I  saved. And maybe these are what Mystery was meant to give, a new variety, one improved and insusceptible to the ravages of white flies and other bugs that so love the solanum family.

When I was a boy, we used to gather as a family on Christmas morning, when new toys meant everything, and now all of us are old and grown, my dad passed on, brother and sisters and mother in a different city, and still there are mornings when I awake with wonder and excitement, when I see the seeds I have collected on the kitchen table, when I wonder what they will become, when I know that their growth is part of my own becoming.