Quarantine Radish Watch

I planted radishes on March 17. Radishes like cold weather. They only take 24 days to grow. Maybe, I thought naively, they’d be ready by the time this whole quarantine thing was over.

Urban farming came to me reluctantly. I grew up across the street from a cornfield. There were 40 people in my high school graduating class and we could all differentiate types of manure by smell. For the uninitiated, chicken is the worst. When we’d take field trips to bustling metropolises like Columbus, Ohio, I’d fantasize about the anonymity of being in a crowd of busy-looking people, of working in a skyscraper. I liked the idea of a fast-paced life, far away from corn.

Transplant Shock 🌱

I heard a metaphor on a gardening podcast this weekend, a metaphor for the times. Which is this: When you're raising seedlings, and you transplant them from their first homes to their second (whether bigger pots or the garden), they will, invariably, die. Or at least: they'll look dead. They'll droop, fall over. If you're a new gardener, you'll be like oh wow I 100% murdered them. But this is called Transplant Shock. As the gardening podcast explained: The little plants are basically traumatized. It takes them a moment, but with some water, some sunlight and a little time, they will start to stand themselves back up.