“It takes as long as it takes,” was an expression I started using after I had my son. Like my mother, I’m a busy person, and am always multi-tasking. But, putting a baby down for a nap or bedtime is a whole different deal. It takes supreme focus and patience, and a floor that doesn’t creak when you are tiptoeing out of the room. When it seemed like he would never fall off to sleep, I released myself from worrying about the ten other things I needed to be doing by saying, “It takes as long as it takes.”
That phrase was going through my head last night when I was saving radish seeds. Each individual pod must be pierced, preferably with a relatively short thumbnail (which tends to get a little tender after a couple hours of this activity), just enough to get inside and not enough to slice through a seed.
And this has to be done over and over and over. And you could say to yourself, it would take about 30 seconds to order a pack of radish seeds over the internet, but you don’t, because you went to the trouble to save and dry those pods in the first place. Which included doing battle with the Southern Green Stink Bug who wanted them fresh.
The variety of size and shape of pods and seeds is remarkable. You can’t discount the short little pods, because they could have one lovely seed inside. I use the sharp point of a pod to nudge out the seeds.
Which ones will actually become a radish? I don’t know. And very likely seeds from a seed company would be more viable, because when you look closely at this collection, you see such variety. But, I do know that even though I spent about two hours on what amounted to less than a tablespoon of seed, I’m very proud of myself. Firsts are important, and this was my first time.
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