Radish seed story
We are radish seeds in little packages on a shelf. A happy lady gathers five packages, we get barcoded at checkout, and then we take a ride to a handsome little house beside the woods. The purchaser, let’s call her Cynthia, opens all the packages and pours us into a bowl made by a potter whose heart is heavy-laden because his homeland is at war, but he makes bowls anyway.
A couple hundred of us in a heap in the middle of the beautiful bowl. I’m just below the top of a section near the edge of the pile. Personally, my pedigree traces back to Greece. When I sprout and bulb out a bit, my skin will be gold and I don’t know why. That’s all my family knows how to do, but that’s not our raison d’être.
Word has it I will taste milder than some of my bowlmates unless I am not eaten, but given time to mature and make more seeds, and I am prepared for that responsibility. My stem will rise, my gangly branches will gangle over pathways or nearby carrots, and Cynthia might have to prop me up, seed pods swaying in the breeze.
I am noticing the myriad legacies represented in this bowl, the histories of communities and individual gardeners that grew us and passed us on before they disappeared, the variety of colors, sizes and shapes we will become, but in the meantime, we’re a bunch of oddly shaped little brown balls in a bowl waiting for our chance.
As I mentioned, I am from Greece, but one way or another, radishes have found our way to most corners of the world. I get texts from a wild cousin in Tunisia (we don’t need phones to text; hard to explain, but it’s easy), descendant of some of the earliest wild radishes.
The wild Tunisian relates how years ago when wooden ships sailed the ocean blue, wild radish seeds found their way into a shipment of saffron, sugar beets and lettuce for the long journey to Australia. Some of the lettuce wilted before landing and was spread around a field destined for sorghum just north of Sydney.
Perfect weather, perfect soil, so the seeds sprouted and spread throughout the eastern coastal area and beyond to the point the government named wild radishes a nuisance to agriculture, at which point in his text Wild Tunisian inserted two or three “snicker and snort” emojis.
I also know wild radishes in Georgia, USA, will proliferate in fallow fields during winter because they can handle frost or sometimes even hard freezes, and their spring flowers thereby provide sustenance for pollinators.
The domesticated variety I am does not abide hard freezes, but radishes like me mature within a month or so and we’re easy to grow, so Cynthia will plant a few of us every other week or so through the season. The seed to my right can plump up into a bright red mature bulb in less than three weeks.
When Cynthia harvests my batch, she will have purple, white, red, pink and bi-colored radishes from many countries, some of which commit war on each other and blow up fields of radishes, sunflowers and oregano with arrogant explosives. Seems pointless.
There are no incidents in recorded history in which radishes from one farm attacked radishes in another farm.
Some of our Asian radish contingent evolved into not only colorful combinations (red inside, green outside, for example) and larger sizes (24 inches long!) but into a tolerance and preference for cooler weather. But if Cynthia poured all her winter radish seeds into this same bowl, she would again see a pile of apparently identical little brown seeds, all innocent, well-intentioned but offering different possibilities with the proper support.
Which brings us to the point– speaking for radishes of all colors, shapes and climate propensities, we think you humans have your egos snarled and tangled, and you ought to relax.
Planting radishes is relaxing.