45  bar steady 30.06  9mph WNW dewpoint 20

              Waning Gibbous Moon of Winds

There lives more faith in honest doubt, / Believe me, than in half the creeds. -Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poet (1809-1892)

I’d put the percentage higher than Tennyson, but his general principle strikes me as true.

The gro-light fluorescents switched on today at 10:00 AM.  At the same time the small electrical heating pads began their function of warming seed mediums bottom layer.  Earlier tiny lettuce seeds went into the small holes in the rock wool seeding mediums, soaked overnight in 5.0 ph water.  Four peat pots, filled with miracle-gro potting soil, received two tomato seeds each.  All the seeds are heritage seeds.  After both trays went into plastic tubs they went under the lights and on the heating pads.  The early phase, sprouting, requires a humid environment so a clear plastic hat went over the lettuce and tomato seeds.  Now we wait, wait, that is, after remembering to turn the lights off after twelve hours and checking periodically to keep the seeding mediums moist, but not so moist that they rot the seedlings.

This process is still unfamiliar to me, so I don’t know what to expect.   Managing heat, light, water and humidity exceeds by a factor of four  what happens in outside gardening.  Outside you have to plant where the new seeds will get enough light, but you don’t provide the light.  You also have to provide water if there isn’t enough, but again, that’s rare.  Unless you’re over eager and plant too early, you don’t have to worry about heat either.  Humidity is fine here, at least during the crucial seed sprouting time.  Outside, you provide decent soil (if not provided for you by the land) and plant at the proper depth.  That’s it for a while.  In this process you are the sun and the rain, the atmosphere.

Over the years I’ve tended to plant perennials and of those almost all flowers or shrubs, so working with seeds is something I’ve not done often.  As I picked up the tiny lettuce seeds with the pick-up (a medical device much like tweezers, but with a finer point, great for removing splinters and, it turns out, picking up tiny seeds), I marveled at how something  so small can unfold and develop into edible lettuce.  A lettuce seed is smaller than the inside of an o and not much bigger than the enclosed portion of an e.  The tomato seed is a bit bigger, it would cover a capital O, but again, from something that size and almost flat, a 24″ plus vine and ripe tomatoes for the salad will emerge.  And you don’t believe in miracles?

This is why proteomics is still the hot new field.  In that seed is the dna for a particular type of lettuce or tomato.  The dna, once the seedling begins to sprout, switches on and off various genes in a finely orchestrated sequence.  The genes, when switched on, express a protein which unfolds, literally, to form, say, part of a stem, or a leaf, or a fruit like the tomato. 

The same process created you, dear reader, and me, too.  Not only life had to come into being, a miracle when inorganic chemicals combined in such a manner as to respond to their environment rather than submit to it, but that life had to create as well a means of propagating that first miracle.  Without reproduction, no future.  Those twisted twin ladders that constitute our dna developed out of that first dna, in other words, that first one-celled organism somehow managed to propagate itself in such a way that its future included a species that could look back on it and say, Grandpa!  We are life with the ability to reflect on itself and its place in the cosmos.  Pretty wonderful.