The enclosed passive solar winter greenhouse built on the South side of the barn solarizes in summer to temperatures so hot that plastic melts and you almost cannot walk inside. One summer the thick plastic sheathing pipe for electrical conduit melted into crazy noodles on the walls and ceiling, stretching all the wires, that had to be replaced, this time in metal piping. I grow winter greens and start seedlings in it in late Winter, but do not grow anything in this greenhouse in summer, or even much past early May when unusually large and sun-bathed seedlings are brought out to harden off and be planted in the real world. I even use a shade cloth in the Winter. Nothing could “live” in there when summer heat “solarizes” anything living. Or so I thought, based on years of experience.

I belatedly reentered to plant our winter salad greens this Mid-November 2020 – year of raging deep trouble and angst. This year, amidst the pandemic and this deteriorating, broken country, keeping on with the season-defying ritual of beginning again in the Fall seemed a heroic effort, like the gravel drive to the barn was miles long. I passed through my (unused) art studio, and through the working section of the barn, and did pause to appreciate bins of seeds, hanging hand tools, hoes and shovels of every ilk, and machinery. I momentarily longed for a barn project, or an art project. Probably something else to force myself to do this year. I flipped the greenhouse breakers to power small vents and fans when the greenhouse temps hit 80, which is any day the sun comes out for at least 20 minutes, even if it is below zero outside.

Every surface in the winter greenhouse was predictably dry, every inch of old soil in the beds was deadened, hot and fine like old peat or powder: it was a hot desert with few remnants of what I had pulled out of the in-ground beds for Spring planting back in early May, and a few molten, twisted abandoned plastic seedling trays like from an oven here and there. I got a sprinkler and a hose from the garden and let it run for hours, and it just penetrated the dryness of the beds and dirt floor by less than an inch. The next day I removed several inches of old powdery dry soil with a small shovel, tossing it without a thought onto in-ground beds I won’t use until Spring seedling time, and poured fresh, moist bagged planting mixes onto the boxes. I planted two sections of lettuce and brassica green mixes and an in-ground box of Pak Choi, relieved I had done it. About a week later, the seedlings are already up and a couple of cheerful inches tall. If it is sunny, I water them once or twice a day, but just the specific places where I planted this year’s greens seeds. This morning I noticed a hint of green somewhere else. Seedlings had impossibly arisen from the discarded solarized soil I had removed and tossed down from last year’s greens boxes. I looked around a little more and found a seedling tray of Phlox on a table that never came up last year had also sprouted.

I never tire of the fascination of seeds and what impulsively happens to them, what they begin as and what they become. They are alive as seeds somehow, yet hard and apparently lifeless. I always feel like it is a heart-racing, shocking miracle when they expand and pop up into plants and grow. Now this, the thriving new integrity of tiny seeds hiding unknown and dormant in dried and extreme baked conditions for two hot seasons, displaying their metamorphosis, despite me and everything else in the world, almost unnoticed again, coming to life off of second hand mist. I take this miracle as a sign of hope, a reminder, encouragement.