Those Anya apricots. I saved ten pits last summer.
I knocked over one of the paper cups the middle of last week and when I went to gently put everything back in…there seemed at first to be no sign I’d ever planted anything in there.
Did I somehow miss that one?!
No.
Oh.
At least I had that one big, healthy one about to sprout. And then seven days ago, an actual sprout in a second cup.
But I checked a few others and they’d rotted away, too, so I quit looking and just kept watering (not too much now!) and figuring I’d give it another week–again, and likely another one after that; maybe all they need is warmer weather?
I transplanted the big one split wide open and its healthy, strong root into a bigger pot with better drainage.
I do not know how that killed it, but it died.
At least by then I had the tiny second one throwing out leaf after glorious little leaf.
And–as long as I was wishing things had turned out different–I wished I’d gotten more than one healthy actual apricot seedling after all that hope and expectation and effort. Not that it mattered; I just wanted it. Like a two year old who’s going to go pout in the corner over not getting a marshmallow.
I woke up this morning and somehow the first thing I did was walk across the house over to those pots.
Where there was very new and completely unexpected life. A sprout! It had no color to it, the future leaves were just tiny bumps on a tiny stem and it could have just been a fragment in the potting soil, but no, it was real and it was not there last night and I grabbed the paper cup out of the windowsill and put it outside in the new sunlight of the day. (Under a bird netting cage. Its little homemade ICU.)
Not ten minutes later I thought, wait, I need a picture.
Already it had taken on a tinge of green. Can you see it? Already it was starting to respond to the sun and creating sugar for its roots below. That fast.
And I bet I can tell you what it’s going to look like a week from now.
We’ll see how it goes, but right now it feels like a gift from Brad. It helps.
