We always love checking the mail. But right now, it is especially fun. After doing our seed ordering, we keep getting little packages, like presents, in the mail, full of magical, magical seeds.

We’ve got lots of seeds left over from our giant order from Seed Savers last year. And we saved a bunch of flower seeds from our garden. But we still needed a few new additions this year.

There were a couple new things we got from the Seed Savers catalog, like more yellow storage onion seeds and a new kind of ‘blue’ soup pea. And then as members of the Seed Savers organization, we ordered a bunch of things from their Yearbook, this phone book sized listing of every type of seed grown, collected and offered by other Seed Savers members to any other member who writes and requests a sample. This is where the real mail fun comes in, as we’re getting different things from different people in different places across the country, so they each arrive unexpectedly, one at a time. We’re trying some hulless oats and raspberry canes from some folks in Maine, mustards from a woman in Illinois, a bushel-sized (so we’re told) gourd from a man in California, and perhaps most exciting, peanuts from a man here in Iowa who’s been growing them locally for long enough that they’re used to the more northern climate they’ll get here.

The rest we got from Cubit’s Organics, a seed company owned and operated by our friend Laura Watt in Toronto. This has been our most exciting package yet. I find myself getting out these seed packets just to hold their soft brown paper in my hands and hear the tiny seeds rattling inside. And we love Cubit’s for being a small business run by a person living out her passions.

I really do think there is magic in seeds, in that way that they’re these little future plants all tiny and self contained and ready to burst, and in that way that when you plant them, rather than running out of them, (with any luck and with open-pollinated varieties) they multiply. And they’re so uniquely, microscopically beautiful. And I love the idea of my garden being connected to all these other gardens, in Toronto, in Maine, in California, in Iowa, and the people who lovingly tend them.