The light is returning, and that's the necessary fact of the season. Every day I will remind myself, and do my best to find some way to embody that fact -- in a small kindness, a generosity, a gesture toward faith that we humans will learn from our teachers the plants. 

With the plants as teachers in mind, we are readying all Open Circle's new seed offerings for 2025. Germination testing is in progress, and after that the seeds will be packaged up and added to our listings, all through the month of January. 

Though 2024 was, as is now normal, a challenging year climate-wise, those challenges revealed varieties that thrived and set seed in spite of several weeks of 115-degree days. One of the surprisingly best performers of the 2024 season was the Persian cucumber Super Zagross. 

The plants went into the field late, many weeks after outgrowing their 4" starter pots. They were still yellowed and straggly when the heat wave arrived, and after that they looked more dead than alive, with crispy brown leaf margins. We ignored them, expecting complete crop failure -- only to find, when we pulled up the plants at the end of the season, that they had produced like crazy, many plants with twenty big cucumbers. 

Heirlooms like these from the hotter regions of the world have much to offer the formerly temperate zones -- look for a few more of them in our new seeds for 2025.

Here's to kindness, generosity, and bountifully adapting gardens in the New Year...