Plant Something · 17 Practices

You will sow three pots on the same afternoon and they will run on three completely different clocks. One shows something within days. One takes a fortnight and is the one you will actually care about. And one will still be alive next year, long after this journey has finished, which is deliberate. Then you wait. There is a fortnight where nothing visible happens at all, and that fortnight is the whole curriculum. Underneath, in the dark, a great deal is going on and none of it is available to you. You will learn why the first leaves are not real leaves. Why overwatering and underwatering look exactly the same, and the three-second test that tells them apart. Why cutting a plant back makes more of it. And you will pull out nineteen healthy seedlings so that four can grow, which is harder than it sounds. At some point something will die. There is a whole section for that, with a diagnosis page, because the difference between a woman who gardens and a woman who does not is whether the first dead pot got read as information or as a verdict. This is not treatment and it does not claim to be. It is the one thing in your life that is completely indifferent to your schedule, and that is what it is for. Seventeen steps. A window, some compost, three packets of seed.