Every Time - the coolest thing

This is a fava bean sprouting.

First it sends out a root into the soil and then raises its head/seed covering till the covering falls off. Next comes the first leaves which almost always look the same for all plants. Then comes the rest of the things that make a fava plant a fava plant.

I recently pulled the rest of the tomatoes out of the garden and sent the still greens to ripen in the garage. Now, it is time to let the soil recover so I spread out what is called a green manue mix. This includes fava beans, green peas, and vetch all of which are nitrogeon fixing plants. In other words, they grab nitrogen from the air and places it in the soil which crop plants use for growing their green parts. Nitrogen tends to wash out of the soil with water so there needs to be some plan of replacement when gardening/farming. This is also why we have so much of it in our rivers, lakes and oceans. Its been washing off the large scale farms for decades.

Come Late January or February, I'm going to turn the crop over back into the ex-sandbox. This will add to the water retention ability of the sand (we're moving it toward dirt without compacting it) and continue to put nitrogen in the soil naturally.

The whole thing is amazing to me.

Over an over again, seemingly inert little pebble-like things change up when placed in dirt and become huge bushes of red ripe tomatoes or gigantic vines of peas.

At first it all looks dead and then....

little green first leaves