Baby peaches. They’ll be ripe in September. Picked this morning from trees that I grew from seed. The seeds came from a lone peach tree that grows on top of High Top Mountain. I gathered the seeds from the ground, where they had been left by animals who had eaten the fruit. I filled the pockets of my loose nylon hiking pants — so much so that when running home, down the mountain, they made my pants fall down … but that’s another story.
That peach tree is sort of a marvel. It’s been there for at least thirty years, uncultivated, unsprayed, unpruned, uncared for by anybody. The top of the mountain is windy and cold. Nevertheless, every year it self-pollinates and produces a good crop of healthy little peaches that taste better than any from the store.
Getting large, hard, tree seeds like those from a peach to germinate is tricky. You have to get the hard shell to break, and the seed also has to undergo a long simulated-winter period of chilling. Without going into the details, I’ll just say it took several years to get some to grow.
There is something fantastic about getting a plant from a seed. If you’ve ever grown garden vegetables from seed — put them one by one in little sterile pots and then watched, counting the days that the seed packet said it would take to germinate — until the little green loop of the new plant bursts out of the soil … you know how cool it is.
The trouble is, it’s so much fun to grow the little things that you always start too many. Nobody in the history of the world ever grew too few tomatoes or cucumbers. Or, as they are called around here, cukes and ‘maters. In this rural county, it’s a running joke (that is also often true) that if you leave you car unlocked anywhere, when you return there will be a bag of cukes and/or ’maters in your back seat. People are desperate to get rid of the overflow. Or people who have been given them are desperately trying to pass them off on someone else.
Which is what I am going to have to do with my peaches. Having successfully started trees from seed, I gave away the baby plants to anybody who would have them, then, being unwilling to kill the rest, planted five of them myself. I don’t even like peaches that much. (I’ll be busy eating the apples and pears that I also planted too much of and that I like better.)
[ Now for the tie-in to photography... ]
Before digital cameras, in order to make your photos “from seed,” you needed a darkroom. Space, running water, blackened windows, chemicals, paper, equipment — it was beyond what many people could manage. But now, with digital, anybody with a computer and a brain can germinate their own. The fun of making a picture from scratch is probably the most unproblematic, uncontroversial aspect of digital. But, like tomatoes and cucumbers, we have just a slight overflow of product … Too many people having too much fun making too many pictures that they then don’t have the heart to just delete or throw on the compost heap.
How long before we start seeing bags of digital images appearing in the backseats of unlocked cars?
-Julie
