Transplanting: The beauty and strain of change

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April 23, 2024

With Spring fully underway, the seeds that some of us planted several weeks ago are now ready to be transplanted into their summer soil homes.

Just as with starting seeds, I found the process of tending and transplanting baby plants held many parallels to everyday life.

Let's start by reflecting on the tending of the seedlings in preparation for transplanting them.

In full disclosure, this process was painfully educational for me. About midway through caring for my seedlings, I noticed they began to display signs of distress.

While I was faithfully and plentifully watering them, they began to look dehydrated and I was at a total loss as to know why. (All of you experienced gardeners likely know where my error was.) Unfortunately, I didn't realize it until it was too late. It turns out that, while I was watering my baby plants from the top, they needed to be watered from beneath - by placing them in trays of water so that their root structures could be fully hydrated.

It was a novice mistake, but this gardening lesson made me think about my own life habits. I thought my plants were well watered because their soil moistened easily. Yet this moisture was only surface deep because at their roots my plants were drying out and dying.

It made me wonder if I ever do things to keep up a superficial facade which gives the appearance that I am thriving but in reality, my watering is only surface deep and my roots are drying out. Am I putting in the hard work to be truly strong and healthy at my "root" level? Or, are my convictions only skin deep in that I say I believe in things and would stand for them but when life gets hard (when the sun comes out and the temperatures rise), I lack the root nourishment and subsequent strength to walk consistently with my values.

Yet another life lesson from tending seedlings is to stop and ponder our actions when we do not get the results we desire. When my plants started to die, I should have stopped to consider, sought counsel, and made a change. But I continued doing what was familiar - what was easy and comfortable. The way I was watering gave me the false sense that I was taking care of my plants. It checked the box and eased my mind, but it was not entirely what the plants needed. I am not a parent, so I want to be cautious about saying anything related to child-rearing, but perhaps it is easy to "top water" children (so that they look healthy in our social circles) while their roots are really drying up. It takes time, energy, and intentionality to know how to properly nourish young roots so that they can be prepared and strong enough to be transplanted into the next stage of life.

Now for the transplanting! Transitions are hard. However, seedlings that have been properly cared for make the change just fine. And as many of us have experienced, even if they pout (wilt) for a short time they soon revive and flourish as their roots reach deeper and spread further. Is there a change in your life that you are apprehensive about? I get it. Change is hard. We get comfortable with where we are. But our tiny planter-cells will never allow us to live the life we were created to live. We will never reach our full potential unless we go through being transplanted (often multiple times throughout our lives). Most of us know what happens to baby plants when they stay in the tiny starter cells - they become root-bound and eventually die. Almost all analogies are imperfect, but perhaps some of us have experienced a type of "death" because we have not risked stepping into a new role, moving to a new area, or saying "yes" to a new opportunity.

Tending Transplants — Photo credit - Joseph Tidwell, Polyface apprentice 2024

In closing, I hope you were blessed in some way by reading the confessions and reflections of a novice gardener. My hope is that you gleaned either practical advice or personal insights that you can apply to your current life.

- Melissa

All Related

Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year--that's a lot of stuff going on kind of lumped together. Which brings me to my thought this month: it's all related. Perhaps the signature difference between Polyface and current mainline food thinking is integration versus segregation. I could use numerous words to describe this basic concept, like parts versus wholes, but I think these two are as good as any. Conventional industrial food systems break things apart. We see it on farms that grow only one or two things, without regard for the greater inter-relatedness of ecology, all the way up to packaged and processed food. Modern processed foods don't use whole ingredients; they use pieces of things. They strip out the germ of the wheat, for example. They refine things to the point that the food bears no resemblance to its natural state. Then they put all these pieces together and call it food. But these pieces came from widely divergent places, and the beautiful unprocessed original no longer exists. When Dad and I were brainstorming what to call this farm venture that would eventually become Polyface, Dad's assumption was that we'd call it Salatin Inc.--you know, like Ford Motor Company or Chrysler (named for Walter P. Chrysler, the founder). I was adamant that it NOT be our family name for two reasons. First, I suggested there may be a day when a Salatin isn't at the helm. Secondly, I wanted the name to recognize integrated thinking. I came up with the name "Interface Inc." to recognize the three great environments: water, land, and forest. For 20 years, during what I call our experimental homesteading days, we'd been planting trees, fencing out riparian zones, fencing out the forest to protect it from cows, and developing a landscape plan with these various zones in mind. The State Corporation Commission rejected the name because, unbeknownst to us, Virginia already had an "Interface Inc." It was a labor arbitration company to work out disagreements between labor and management. I was milking the cow when Dad told me the bad news, and I spontaneously blurted: "If we can't be Interface, let's be Polyface--the farm of many faces." Dad laughed, but we both liked the idea, and it stuck and was approved. The point here is that from the outset, all our thinking was about how to leverage the various assets of the diversified ecosystem and then harness the distinctives of the various animals. As a result, we looked at symbiotic natural patterns and have done our best to duplicate them. The Eggmobile follows the cows so the chickens can scratch through cow pies. We use pigs to aerate compost. Our small flock of sheep is like a glorified weed eater, cleaning up fence lines and around farm buildings to reduce mowing. The animals move through the pastures, paddock to paddock; they don't stay in the same place. Illustrative of "conventional-think", Virginia Tech veterinary professors who judged my son Daniel's 4-H talk titled "Symbiosis and Synergy in the Racken (Rabbit-Chicken) House" at the state contest nearly 30 years ago couldn't restrain their skepticism. "Aren't you concerned about diseases with two species that close to each other?" I was never so proud. He was about 15 and, without batting an eye, looked those professors in the eye and replied: "We've learned that most pathogens don't cross-speciate." Folks, I had not prepped him for that question. When he responded like that, those three professors slapped their legs and laughed at the audacious notion. They had no further comments and immediately tried to recruit him to enroll at Virginia Tech and major in Veterinary Science. Instead, he stayed with me on the farm and scaled up these simple integrated relationships to the thousands of animals we have now--with virtually no vet bills. Meanwhile, conventional experts wring their hands over bird flu, screw worm, African swine fever, blackleg, and a host of maladies that attack places where an integrated approach toward biology is severely lacking. Pediatrician Dr. Sharon Goldfield, director of population health for the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, wrote a fascinating op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week titled "Baby Food and Youth Obesity." She slammed "packaged baby and toddler foods" because they fail even rudimentary nutrition standards. Their surveys indicated that "80 percent of children are eating packaged toddler foods, many of which are ultra-processed, from an early age, with 43 percent of them eating these foods at least five days a week." Kids are eating out of boxes and slurping from concoctions created by a segregated mentality from field to stomach. This segregated thinking even permeates parental decision making, divorcing overall health from food and assuming whatever happens, pharmaceuticals can fix it. At Polyface, everything we do assumes that everything we do affects something else we do. It's that simple. Both land health and people health occur when we realize everything relates to everything. You can't just eat well and not exercise. You can't dismiss the value of sunlight on your skin; especially early morning sunlight. Hydration. Sleep. Stress. Forgiveness. Gratitude. It's all part of us. As we celebrate all these holiday times and imagine the relatedness of Thanksgiving with the Christmas story with the eagerness of a new year, imagine all the things going on in your life and how they work together. Or how if you pull them apart, things fray. Be assured that here at Polyface we're trying to integrate ecology, people, and economy in an overall symbiotic whole to deliver you the best food at a reasonable price. And we thank you for helping us build an integrated whole that respects earthworms all the way to our dinner plate and microbiome. We're not feeding you earthworms, but be assured they play an ongoing role in every bite you enjoy from Polyface. Thank you. Joel