The Humble Seed Packet

There's a lot of hope in a seed packet.

You might not think it to look at it—because a seed packet is quite unassuming—but that little packet is bursting with promise and potential.

You'll plant those seeds, and they'll grow and grow and grow, and they might be pumpkins or they might be pole beans, or they might even be sunflowers that stretch six feet into the sky. And you'll harvest the bounty that your humble seeds produce and you'll marvel at the thought that a single seed could accomplish so much in such a short span. And then later, when it's late autumn and the earth is shifting seasons, you'll go out to your garden and set to work saving the seeds that came from the plants that your little seeds grew.

And you'll ponder the miracle. Not only have your seeds germinated, grown, and produced food, but they have also replaced themselves many-many-many times over. A single sunflower seed can produce a plant with a sunflower head that contains over one thousand seeds; a single pumpkin seed can become a plant that produces a prizewinning giant pumpkin that weighs over one thousand pounds. And you'll do the math for a moment and calculate the return on a single packet of seeds, then you'll realize that few pastimes offer as much return on such a minimal investment.

There's no question that gardening has its challenges. Planting seeds takes guts and tenacity, a sense of humor and a sense of adventure. But, oh—the satisfaction! For your outlay of effort—think about it, you're pressing seeds into dirt—you reap innumerable rewards, both tangible and intangible. You grow food, you grow flowers, you grow the future.

So you harvest the seeds and do it all over again. And the next time you pass by a rack of seed packets at the garden center, remember this: there's a lot of promise tucked into that tiny little packet.

Sow some seeds of hope this spring, won't you?