Forget Christmas in July, try farming at Thanksgiving. This was not the plan. By Thanksgiving weekend, the writing was on the wall. Or rather, the frost was on the girls.
They were toast. Absolutely done. Colorado had finally called in its chips on the Weather Lottery™ I’d been playing, and let me tell you…the house always wins.
So I did what needed to be done. I snipped off the seeded buds, working carefully to get those precious seeds out. Then I took all those girthy stalks down—the ones that had been so magnificent in their November prime, heavy with promise. I tied them in a bunch and laid them in the grass right next to the spent boys.
It looked like a plant funeral out there. But this wasn’t their final resting place—not by a long shot. I had plans for them, but they needed time to Ret. Ret is Dutch for “rot a little,” which sounds grim, but it’s actually the beginning of something beautiful. Retting is how you separate the hurd from the long bast fiber—the first step on the journey from stalk to something usable. More on that in a future blog on this process For now, they just needed time on the ground. Time to let nature do its thing.
Now, the bad news: the seeds I did get from those outdoor girls? They didn’t look great. They had their hard outer shell, sure. But they were… misshapen. Squished-looking. Like they’d given it their best shot and Colorado had said, “Not today, babe.” Kinda a bummer, but hey, I knew what I was signing up for when I rolled those dice.
PLOT TWIST.
Remember those plants I’d been growing in pots? The ones I toted around with me to my pop-up road show earlier last year? Because they were mobile, I had an option those poor frozen-in-ground girls didn’t.
I brought them inside.
Into my south-facing garden window they went, with about an extra month of borrowed time. And let me tell you: that window worked magic. Those seeds finished developing exactly as I hoped. They came out with their characteristic tiger stripe aesthetic—beautiful, striped, ready. Everything the outdoor seeds wanted to be but couldn’t quite pull off.
By the time everyone was finished, right before Christmas, I could finally relax. I was heading out of town to visit friends and family, and for the first time in months, the plants didn’t need me. The stalks were still out in the grass, doing their slow work of retting, and the seeds were safe and sound inside their tiger-striped shells.
But that retting process? Oh boy. That was a whole journey.
Stay tuned for the next edition of the series: What the Heck is Retting??
