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Is there any seed that is at once as viable and valued as the radish?
In an envelope of radish seeds – any company, any brand, any variety, any degree of “organic” or generic – are very small seeds – not too small (like the lettuce or carrot) so as to lose an account of from the envelope, from one’s palm or one’s fingertips – which when sown in the dirt, loam, or soil (it matters little the quality) in the garden (and I use the term loosely) will germinate and sprout – sprout, it seems, even before it takes root; grow and expand – against drought or trampling (within reason) or coldness or overcast or gloom and doom… I get carried away.
The radish needs no Saving Throw is my assertion. They assuredly will grow and thrive and ripen and reward.
And quickly! Sprout from seeds faster than anything in my gardens, except maybe the pea. Maybe the turnip (the rather ponderous, rather ugly, relative to the radish).
They will all come up, adversity or no, those round radish seeds, so start with proper spacing. Try that with the carrot. Try that with the parsnip (of the carrot family). Try that with the cucumber. For those one needs to play a percentage game.
All this is my argument for viability of the red or purple and snow-white and green radish.
But my point is broader.
After our winters here, which last sometimes till April, and our cold months, which last longer, it is so important for my spirits to work warming soil, and to sow all the cold-weather, Old World seeds (always, for me, it is firstly the 4-foot double row of radishes [1/4 of the envelope]). Six days later, and in even less than ideal conditions this year (argument for viability), it was so beautiful to see the radish sprouts: two heart-shaped leaves atop a white stem.
Nothing else to be seen yet in the gray No Man’s Land.
Sure, the chives had been greening. Some strawberries were evergreen. The blackberries and raspberries and blueberries had nubs and buds. But those are established plants with deep roots. Not young. “Continuing,” as Bilbo Baggins said, the One Ring corrupting him, him fading in time and wearying of Middle Earth, more apart from than a part of them.
The radishes are this year’s miracle. And they come every year.
This, what it does for my spirit, is my argument for value. And I haven’t even mentioned the fruit of the radish.
A couple weeks later and not a single parsnip came up. Very few lettuce or carrots came up. There seems to be something not aligned, not in alignment. A few quite cold nights, only one light rain over three weeks, dry heat with day after day of June sun. And most importantly something wrong with my soil.
The tomatoes are slow to come. Much strawberry isn’t coming back this year. The asparagus bed has been rewarding, as were the chives (I actually took a snip and snipped it in my salad a couple weeks ago. Do you know I have never done that before? I have not esteemed chives. “All things are good when looked at hungrily,” Henry Miller said in “Tropic of Cancer.”)
Do you know that maybe the value for me of the radish is dependent on – more accurately, flows from – its viability?
The viability of everything else that is not the radish is, from day to day, week to week, season to season, year to year, basically a crapshoot.
The arcane and archaic Saving Throw allows one to roll the 20-sided die [sic] to determine whether or not a roll of one or more further 4-, 6-, 8-, 10-, 12-, or 20-sided dice [sic], or an accretion of two 10-sided dice (e.g. a roll of 1 and 3 being 13, not the sum 4 or product 3) generating a percentile, which subsequent dice values told would represent and quantify loss of health or even immediate death by wound, fire, blow, fall, atomizing, acid, poison or pestilence.
Hence, Throw the dice to be – potentially – Saved.
The humble radish rolls a loaded dice to Save, but for every other seed there’s some great – rather, utter – degree of chance.
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