Miracle of a mustard seed

Here's something I've had in my mind for a very long time, but not yet written about until now. Way back during my first year farming on my own—well, actually it was the fall before, a mini "trial season" of sorts where few things worked because I hadn't made enough mistakes yet to know what to do and not do—I was ready to plant my first crop: salad greens!

I'd seen the entire process and done every part of it as a worker on other people's farms, but it was my first time doing it all myself for my own farm. First I prepared the ground, as we always did, bringing the tractor to till up a patch of sod and find the soil underneath all those grass plants—just as, indeed, underneath every plant everywhere around here lies many feet of dirt, soil, ready to be turned from two-dimensional surface of the earth to three-dimensional space ready for useful activity: a field to plant in. I marked off rows and brought out my push seeder to help there become neat lines of new plants, useful to people, where there had been just weeds before. I poured in the round, hard, black orbs from a packet (quite literally they were "as small as a mustard seed"), ran the seeder back and forth straight as I could and just had to trust that those little seeds were dribbling down there, not too deep and not too shallow, being too small to even identify once covered with dirt.

After clearing those sod weeds, loosening the soil, and covering the tiny round kernels with the soil, I left, my work done. In three days I returned. Where there was nothing before but bare dirt, now there were visible faint lines of tiny mustard seedlings, each with its tender stem unfolding up and out of a crack in the seed up through the dirt, spreading into two-lobed seed leaves, and a little root pushing down into the soft earth. I had seen seeds before, of course—perhaps the first was in second grade, the bean seed in the paper towel, or perhaps before that the colorful marigolds in our flower garden at home, dying and drying to seed heads, surprising me with new marigolds the following summer sprouting up far from where we had planted them. I had planted thousands of seeds working for other people and tended the resulting crops. So now, off on my own, with my own field, my own seeder, my own seeds, I can't say I was surprised, as much as mystified, in the sense of beholding the mystery of what had happened.

Sure, through my own work, these plants had come into existence, for which I was responsible to grow and eventually (hopefully) sell, to support my own life. But how was it, really, that those seedlings came to be—that those seeds, seemingly inert for months or even years, at this particular moment had put forth plants? I didn't do that. Somehow, the seeds had done that. It felt as much a miracle as I had ever experienced.

With all our technology, with miniaturization, with all our science and engineering and "just add water!" hype, we can't come close—not even close—to making something that does anything near to what a little mustard seed can do. Just add water, something from nothing. I'm not sure we really even understand how it all works, though we know that it does. Some look to religion, for an answer in God; some find understanding in biology. Now and again someone from the CSA will offer an appreciative comment about how skilled I am at creating such good food or, from a religious perspective, how God has given me the skill of bringing food from the earth. And I appreciate the sentiment, I really do—but I know that it wasn't me who did the work of creating the vegetable. I don't have much of a hand in that. Somehow, it's the plants that did the job, that figured out how to create these things we eat. All I did was to spend my own day's work giving them the conditions necessary for them to do theirs.