Why rye

Remember this picture?
They’re the seeds from my rye cover crop.
My garden got insane at the end of last summer. I got lazy and tired and I took a kind of destructive pleasure in watching it wreak havoc. It held nothing for me and I could give nothing for its aid. I loved it.
And then fall came and it was time to tear it down so we did.
It’s smart to plant cover crops because they stop soil erosion over the winter, but I especially needed to plant one because the soil in the garden this year was absolutely awful. So you plant the cover crop and then you turn it under. It breaks up all that compressed nothingness and tries to turn it into something workable, something not clay, which strangles everything. Almost everything. It even tried to strangle the rye, which is tenacious and voted “most likely to succeed” by seed salesmen.
See how the ground fractured around its feet? Ridiculous.
But still the rye grows.
And that is why the rye will prevail.
There’s a lesson in this, somewhere.
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