🌾 The Ear Inside the Stem

Hi 👋

As a young boy, I used to watch my gran sow carrots in her vegetable patch in rural Somerset. I remember how hard she worked. Her garden was her pride and joy. However, carrots take time to grow, and she was never known for her patience. A few weeks in, she'd get twitchy, kneel down, and dig one up just to see what was happening under the soil. Then she'd put it straight back, pat it down, and carry on as if nothing ever happened.

We all know you're not meant to do that.

Carrots hate being disturbed once they're in; the whole point is to leave the roots alone and let them find their own way. It seemed obvious to me back then but now, I understand her completely. That moment you can't see what's happening is exactly the moment doubt turns up. Starting anything requires trust, and doubt has to be there also, otherwise there is nothing for trust to overcome.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how a seed has to let go of its old form and go into the dark soil before anything new can arise. I ended that email on planting as an act of hope. But I never talked about what actually happens to the seed while it's down there.

I've spent many years working in agriculture, so my muse this week is the seed being sown in my local Cornish fields: winter wheat.

Imagine a dried prune that has been shrunk down, its skin tight around the stone with no flesh left in between. That's roughly what a grain of wheat is, a tiny dry fruit holding a single seed. When it's sown in the soil, the grain germinates, and the root comes first, reaching down before anything reaches up. Then a shoot follows, wrapped in its own sheath, pushing through the soil until it meets the light. Only then does the first leaf break free, and the plant is able to photosynthesise. Until all that happens, the seedling lives entirely on starch its parent plant made from last summer's sunlight.

Then the field will spend months looking like nothing more than a lawn (wheat is a grass, after all). But under the surface, it's working hard, switching over from making leaves to making what's known as the ear. By the time the stem starts to properly stand up, the ear already has twenty to thirty spikelets set, the grain for this year's harvest, even though it's only a few millimetres long.

As the wheat begins to stand, growers will pull up a few plants, split the stems lengthways with a knife and open them out. Tucked down near the base sits that young ear. They do that to a handful of stems from a whole field to see how far the crop has come, the timing of their next jobs depends on it. My gran put her carrots back in the soil in the hope they'd still grow, while the growers simply give up a few stems. But the urge underneath is the same: they want to look under the surface and know what's happening, to have a sense of control.