Aerogarden update

Tomorrow will be one week. Four seeds germinated; basil, chives, savory and thyme. The three slow ones are still soaking; parsley, mint, oregano.

I don't know what savory is.

I bought some onetime to put into bread because a friend asked me about it. Over the phone he reads off the recipe. I hardly have the patience for it. Because it's relayed as if adding savory changes the nature of bread while there is nothing different about it. No need for all the superfluous instructions. The recipe goes: make bread, add savory.

But why? What's so special about savory? If I look, I'll bet $100.00 they say it's good for adding to fish or chicken.

* Savory complements egg dishes. (So does tarragon, and very well too)

* Beans, lentils and peas.

* Robust flavor holds up well in stews.

* Combines well with breadcrumbs in stuffings.

* Most commonly used with green vegetables, especially well with beans.

* German word for it, bohenkraut, means bean herb. Because it naturally aids with digestion of these sometimes difficult legumes.

Okay, fine. Here's $100.00 dollars.

I learned something. And I paid a lot more than that for education. A LOT more. And what did I learn? I leaned to look things up before making a bet. I learned there are different types of savory, winter and summer. I learned savory was the strongest of herbs that Europeans had before they had access to the spice trade and pepper.

And that caused to realize something mightily impressive and ironic on my own that wasn't written down. Imagine it, all those Europeans living in their little feudalism huts. No refrigeration, bad meat all over the place, all the time, and mostly savory to disguise it and flavor everything. One herb, basically, then boom, the world of food changes, and now they have access to everything, and because of globalization they, everybody,  really can have everything, even exotics. But that is hardly appreciated because that same industrialization and globalization created an insuperable distance between people and the source of all of their food, not just spices. So that they don't even know what individual spices do. When it comes to spices, people are utterly lost. There is no good reason for them to know anything. All of that is already done for them.

Like me today. I didn't add anything to my Trader Joe's chicken pot pie. It is perfect all by itself. A holiday feast right there in a paper tv dinner pie container. I could host a holiday dinner and serve nothing but Trader Joe's pies. And it would work.

Aren't these baby plants cute?

Imagine gardening becoming so scientific that each seed gets its own pod. How trusting that the seed will work! That's incredible.

Sometimes they don't work. Eh. So what. The company will send you a replacement pod. But it will be behind schedule a few weeks. It will lag behind all the rest.

Plants growing from seeds has never ceased to fascinate me. I'm filled with the same sense of wonder as I did the first time. In the first grade I went seed planting crazy. My dad gave me a couple dozen teeny-tiny red clay pots. Miniature versions of the regular things. I planted every seed from everything that I ate, every apple, every orange, peas, corn, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds, avocado seeds, beans, grapefruit. Everything. My parents indulged this obsession and allowed me to ring an oriel window with rows of tiny red clay pots. Some grew, some didn't. I lost track of what worked. Then our family was transferred and I gave my apple tree babies, and orange tree babies to my grandmother for safekeeping. She blew it. And I never did forgive her that carelessness.

Maybe I should do that now. Her goes. OoooooooUuuuuummmmmmm.

Grandma, I forgive you for being so careless and really not giving a shit about my little trees. Amen.

There.

I must also thank my professor of Biology 101, an elective I took in pursuit of BSBA. She said to the theater of students. "Look. There's no such thing as a stupid question, okay? If you're stuck on something you really must ask because everything that follows is based on your comprehension of the present material."

We all thought, "cool."

Then later, a very beautiful long-haird blond young woman raised her hand and drawing attention to herself she asked an incredibly stupid question that revealed to all of us that she hadn't even bothered reading the text.

The professor was disgusted by being held back by the lowest common denominator. She wouldn't mind if the class were thinned out. It's time to get to thinning. She took a few breaths to settle her composure and answered, "When I said there's no such thing as a stupid question, that presumed that you at least read your textbook before asking."

The beautiful privileged young woman was crushed with burning embarrassment. We didn't notice her after that. She was shrunk inside her shoe.

We were all thinking, "that's hard." 

We all learned that lesson.

Our class went on to plant cell structure and photosynthesis. The story picks up with sunlight hitting the plant leaves and converting nutrients in the soil into sugars and letting out CO2 from the leaves. 

But it didn't say anything about seeds, except that the plant makes them. 

And that's where my chief interest was. The textbook did not answer my questions. It did not settle the mystery of seeds. How does this miracle even happen? Yes, the seed has DNA. The plant has to grow a leaf before all this photosynthesis stuff can happen.

So I dared myself and asked, knowing her impatience with stupid questions. Knowing what will happen to me if Miss Lucky Strikes doesn't appreciate my question or if she thinks the other students cannot benefit from her answer.

"How does the plant grow from a seed to its first leaf? Why doesn't it just sit in the dirt and rot?" 

A hush fell over the theater. I thought, we all thought, "Oh shit. Here it comes." 

Brace yourself, boy. I honestly did not know if my question is stupid or not.

The professor stopped cold. An uneasy silence fell over the the theater like a pall. She looked straight into my eyes. I saw behind her eyes real pity for my infantile yearning ignorance. She walked toward me then stopped. Then she said tenderly as if speaking to a child, "You see, plants evolved to store sufficient energy and instructions in its DNA so that when the required conditions are met, warmth and moisture, then there's enough energy stored up to propel the seed to its first leaf. Then all this photosynthesis takes over." 

The relief that I felt was vast. And she really did clear up a tremendous mystery. Yes, maybe I should have known all that, maybe I should have intuited it like the textbook assumes, but I didn't. And that one single thing is greater than all the rest that I leaned in that class. To me. Comprehending that meant more to me than comprehending photosynthesis or myosis and mitosis. More than comprehending the exchange of gases. And osmosis. More than understanding that we need plants a heck of a lot more than plants need us. I will never forget this woman. She changed my life.