April 2025

Seeds

• Sacred Seeds
• Seeds & Food Safety
• The Seeds On Your Plate
• Seed Starting – Prectical Guide

For more than a decade, I have been a biodynamic herb grower. Farming is not a job but a lifestyle. In the season, you wake up with the sun and fall into bed at sunset seven days a week.

Where I live, the growing seasons are short and intensive, and winter is spent studying herbalism, planning, and ordering seeds. Seasonal living is part of a lifestyle that is aligned with the daily and yearly cycles of nature.

I am telling you all that because I was always excited when April arrived in my yearly cycle. By the end of October, when the season ended, I was exhausted physically and mentally. I couldn’t think of starting the cycle again. But in December, I was browsing through seed catalogs; I would order seeds in January and start dreaming of the garden.

April 1 was the first day of seeding in the greenhouse. It was the first time in the season when I would dip my hands in soil while mixing potting mix.

Sacred Seeds

The word shiva means the seed, the creator, and the benefactor of life. The mother and father, the source of all wisdom, who transform old into new, death into life.

In the Iroquois creation myth, the “sky woman” fell from the sky, holding seeds in her feasts. She then spread them on the mud from the bottom of the ocean to create Turtle Island or North America.

Seeds are the transition between past life and future life, death and resurrection, ancestors and offspring at the same time. As such, seeds contain the collective wisdom of all past generations, making sure that all life will continue.

As a farmer standing in the greenhouse every April, seeding hundreds of seeds, I always felt awe and hope mingled with some fear. Emotions that I know farmers all around the world feel at the door of a new season. I visited my seed trays every day, watering them and praying. It was always a mystery to me how seeds germinated.

Fertility & Abundance

In the Jewish tradition, pomegranate is a symbol of fertility and abundance. I never counted the number of seeds in a pomegranate, but according to the Rabbis, there are 613 seeds in a pomegranate, as many as the number of mitzvot or practices in Judaism. In Kabbala, the Jewish mysticism pomegranate is a symbol of mystical union, a state called the garden of pomegranates (Pardes Rimonim) where seeds of love, justice, compassion, and hope take root in the heart of those who enter it.

For seeds to germinate, they must be buried in the dark Earth. The Earth, the archetype of the mother nurturing with unconditional love and compassion, midwife seedlings.

In Greek mythology, Hades, the God of the underworld, kidnaps Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, the Goddess of Growth. In her anger, Demeter stops all growth, and the Earth becomes barren. Before Hades returns Persephone to her mother, he tricks her into eating six red seeds of pomegranate, sealing her fate to spend half of the year in the darkness of the underworld.

Seeds are small and humble but offer a potential for growth and endless possibilities. They are vital to sustaining life on the Earth, yet modern culture considers seeds as a commodity.

Consider developing bidirectional relationships with seeds where you acknowledge that seeds hold the wisdom of all life; therefore, it is important that we hold them sacred and preserve the ones that developed naturally through the evolution of the Earth.