The seeds we plant in our soil can endure as trees or plants for generations, reproducing and repopulating gardens and affecting our planet long past our own lifetimes. A planted seed may even create a forest that will last for the duration of planet earth.   Seeds are so persistent that many of the “weeds” we see in our gardens are descendants of plants that were cultivated by people of previous generations and the plants are still reproducing without any help from humans.

Let’s consider the little miracles we call seeds. Within each seed exists not just one life-form, but also the potential for that life-form to continue producing new life-forms for generations. Seeds are incredibly powerful, yet they are free to us all, and they are everywhere.

Seeds are most often so small that they are easy to overlook or ignore. In this way, seeds act almost like secret-agents of amazing potential, as they quietly grow and shape the world.   

Before a seed ever becomes a seed, it will start its life as a small growth on the stem of a plant. Feeding on the nourishment from the plant, the little growth will develop a stem and a flower bud.  The flower bud will grow bigger until, bursting with promise, the flower bud opens itself up to the amazing experience of sunlight, fresh air, and fellow life-forms, such as flying insects and spiders. As the flower grows it forms a fruit with seeds, and soon the seeds are ready to become new plants.

Seeds can be dispersed in a variety of ways – by the hands of humans, by wind, by clinging to an animal’s fur for a ride to a new location, by being eaten by an animal and then being eliminated in the animal’s droppings, by flowing water, by seed pods that pop open and eject seeds into the area, and even by just falling onto the soil and starting to grow from there. If they land in a suitable spot, they sprout their roots and leaves and a new plant is born. Given time, a seed will grow into an easily visible new plant life that will shape the world around it, and eventually create many new seeds of its own, often unnoticed and with no help from anyone.

It almost seems that these new seedlings appear out of nothing, but we know they didn’t come from nothing – they came from seeds.

Annual plants live for only 1 season, growing and producing more seeds, and then dying. They leave their seeds to carry on the work in the next season. Trees, on the other hand keep growing more seeds year after year within their fruits and nuts.

Seeds produce many different forms of life, and strangely, we can’t see what resources they have consumed to grow into plants. The resources they need to grow are available for free in nature: sunlight, soil, air and water, and they don’t seem to use up the resources. Healthy soil is created from the decomposing leaves and branches that older plants have dropped, so nothing goes to waste in the plant world – it only gets richer and richer. As plants live their life-cycles, they contribute to the health and growth of the next cycle of plants.

Think about this, if you plant a seed that will become as dominant a life-force as an oak tree is in the garden, and it will reproduce for generations and generations, and become a forest, and an ancestor of forests, wouldn’t you want to carefully consider what seeds you plant? 

We humans do prefer some plants over others. Perhaps we don’t want thorny plants in our gardens or plants that may grow to choke out our favorite plants, or plants that will grow too big for the area. In this case, we choose to eliminate these plants from the garden.   

It’s good to know what a plant is before uprooting it. Some plants that we originally thought we should remove turned out to be useful crops that have been cultivated by people in previous generations. To name a few that have appeared in our food forest: dandelions, oxalis, flax, chamomile and purslane. We let these volunteer plants continue to grow in our food forest. 

Just as good seeds produce good fruits, so also unwanted or unfavorable seeds grow in the garden and reproduce more unwanted or unfavorable fruits. We call these unwanted plants weeds. If you’re sure you want to eliminate a weed, it’s best to pull it out of the soil, roots and all, before it creates seeds of its own and especially before it can disperse the seeds around the garden. By eliminating one weed before it goes to seed, you will effectively be avoiding having thousands more weeds sprout from the seeds of that first one. We recommend to plant a good seed of your choosing in the bare space left after you have pulled a weed.

In the world of seeds, there’s abundance everywhere, so don’t underestimate the incredible power of seeds!!!!!!

Since there’s such amazing abundance that comes from a seed well planted in soil, just for fun, let’s take a break here and compare an investment of $1.00 in the stock market to an investment of 1 seed in the soil:

STOCK MARKET (Money Economy): 

1. First of all, to even purchase stock in the stock market, we would have to pay a fee, so it wouldn’t make sense to just invest $1.00 if the fee is $10.00 to create the transaction, but to keep it simple, let’s just say the investment is $1.00. We would use our own heart and mind to decide what to invest in, then pay to create the transaction in the stock market.
   
2. We likely first obtained the dollar by performing some type of valuable work. We were then taxed on the money we earned, and this $1.00 is part of what we have left-over after our hard work and paying our taxes.
3. If we are lucky in the stock market and if we keep our money invested in it for many years, we may average 6% return on investment. Invest $1.00, earn $0.06 in a year, ending the year with $1.06. Again, this is if we are lucky, but there’s also a chance that we will lose it all and end up with nothing, and it would be completely out of our control.
4. When we do earn interest on our money, the national and state governments will be sure to take a portion of it, so we will have earned even less. 
5. In terms of money, we see very weak growth at best. We have to keep working hard every day to get enough money to pay the next bill, and then the next and the next…. it’s a slave economy when we work for money.

SEEDS (Nature’s Economy): 

1. There’s no fee involved for planting a seed. We use our own heart and mind to decide which seed to plant and where to plant it, then use our own hands to plant the seed.
2. We first obtained the seed either by finding a seed growing on a plant already – which would cost $0.00 – no money, or by purchasing a seed packet. If we purchased the seed in a $1.00 packet containing 100 seeds, then the cost of the seed would be $0.01 – one cent. The number of seeds in a packet can range from 10 – 2000 seeds/packet, so the cost of a seed could vary, but the example here is a reasonable one, and most seeds are very inexpensive and rarely would you pay $1.00 for one seed.
   
3. If you plant one seed, and in one year the plant yields even 1 new seed, you have a 100% return on your investment. If it yields 100 seeds, then your return on investment would be 10,000%. Or, if the plant yields another 1000 seeds then your return on investment would be 100,000%. (this is common!!!) If you were to plant all of those seeds, and many of them gave you the same yield, you would be approaching infinity in a few years! This one seed then makes an infinite number of new seeds possible. We have some control over this process too, when we plant the seed at the right time and in the right location. If it wasn’t planted at the right time initially, sometimes a seed will lay dormant for a long time, then one day, when the time is right, it grows.
   
4. We get to keep all of our seeds, and we can eat them (if they’re edible), or plant them and get more plants and more seeds, make alcohol with them, or sell them, or share them, or feed them to animals, or make jewelry with them, and even create a piece of art for your mother with them 
5. In terms of seeds, once you plant them, they begin an unending chain of abundance, and soon you are overflowing with seeds!!!

Notice in the money-based economy, you work hard to gain little, while in the seed-based economy, you work little to gain much.

You can eat seeds and the fruits they produce, so they give you not only abundance, but great health. You can’t eat money, so you have to go find a way to trade it for food or medicine.

One reason why it’s so fun to create a food forest is to participate in this abundance. 

Here’s a romaine lettuce plant that matured in the food forest until it grew these white puffy flowers. Inside of each of these flowers is about 10 – 20 seeds for new romaine lettuce plants. A few days ago, we picked all of the seeds off of this plant and planted them around the food forest, and now there’s a whole new batch of seeds to be picked and planted. There are way too many seeds to count, and they all came from one seed, which grew into one lettuce plant. During the time the lettuce plant was growing, we would regularly pick and eat lettuce leaves too, so we got to enjoy eating the lettuce, and we still got the seeds. How’s that for abundance?

Romaine Lettuce grows thousands of seeds – in 1 season!

This picture of a bag of arugula seeds that we have left over from one arugula plant. Another clear example of the seed economy of abundance – what a return on investment after one season!!! Plus we got to enjoy the arugula as it grew in the food forest.

From a Handful of Arugula Seeds come an outrageous increase in Arugula Seeds! And we also got to enjoy eating the leaves as they grew! There’s only amazing increase in Nature!

Here’s a bag of macadamia nuts, which are also the seeds for new macadamia trees. This came from 1 harvest last January 9th, and it only took about 15 minutes to gather.

Macadamia Trees grow these seeds in abundance, year after year! The seeds are delicious to eat (We call them Macadamia Nuts when we eat them), and the seeds will also grow more Macadamia Trees! Imagine if every seed grew another Macadamia Tree? Pretty soon we would have enough Macadamia Seeds to feed everyone!

Here are packets of seeds we gathered from the food forest for selling at our farm stand: Pigeon Peas, Guava Tree, Passion Fruit Vine, Nasturtiums, Calendulas, and Bird of Paradise. We are working on getting lettuce, arugula, fig and many other seeds ready for sale too!

A variety of seeds packaged for sale at the farm stand.

We experience amazing abundance from the food forest every day!



Our gardens provide a physical example to teach us how to grow well-being in our lives, too, so now let’s take a look at how invisible seeds operate in our lives.

OUR THOUGHTS AND IDEAS ARE INVISIBLE SEEDS made of energy. They exist as seeds only in our minds until we plant them into the field of our lives by speaking them aloud. Then, when we act on our words, we are cultivating their growth.

You can choose which thoughts and ideas you verbalize. If you don’t speak a thought, it will never be born or grow. 

Once spoken, our thoughts and ideas have creative power which forms emotions, beliefs, and meanings in ourselves and others, which lead us to reactions and behavior changes, which change our lives and the lives of others in the world around us.

Our words can be dispersed into the lives of listeners in a variety of ways – they can be overheard, repeated, remembered, written, and recorded as songs or speeches. 

As with physical seeds, the resources these seeds consume in order to grow into beliefs and emotions and meanings are invisible and made of the field of energy which surrounds us.

When we speak, we plant a seed into the field of our life which is connected to the field of everyone’s lives. Just as in the garden, the seeds we plant with our words will live on, reproducing and affecting ourselves and others long past our own lifetimes – for many generations, and maybe for the duration of planet earth. 

Sometimes it takes time to see the seed grow. Patiently, seeds can lay dormant, then spring up and appear, sometimes even surprising the gardener who forgot they ever planted them, or who believed they would never show up.

We often think that the events of our lives just happen, but the truth is, they came from a seed. For example, we hear something spoken that triggers feelings of fear or hate and we begin to believe things about the world that change the way we act and those actions shape our realities. We don’t see the connection – that it started with an invisible seed – the spoken word.

Since whatever seeds we plant with our words will grow in our lives and affect the world around us, let’s choose our words carefully and plant the best seeds we can.

Like many wise mothers used to say to their children, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” because they knew that the best seeds to plant are the good ones!

Just as we wouldn’t plant seeds for undesirable garden plants, we can also choose not to speak thoughts that would grow into hate and fear, and instead speak ideas that grow into love and joy and happiness, health and goodness and peacefulness. Infuse your words with love.

Plant seeds that produce good fruit. Say kind and helpful things to yourself, your family, your friends and your neighbors. Talk about the good things that you want to see in the future. Imagine and speak of a future full of joy and hope and love. Use your ideas to bring solutions to problems and speak about solutions and possibilities for change. Sing joyful songs to yourself and express gratefulness which will increase the good feelings around you.

Pull up undesirable weeds when you see them growing, and replace them with good word-seeds that produce good fruits. Look at the cloud, and notice the truth that there’s silver lining. See a door close, and remember that a new door will open with new possibilities. With your words, you can accentuate the possibilities for good that can come out of a situation. You can speak of your ideas of possible solutions.

We must become aware that when we speak thoughts that are weed seeds that will grow into ugliness, fear, hate and shame, they will grow into undesirable futures.   Probably most of us can remember when someone spoke negative words over us, and it can be hard to overcome those bad feelings and beliefs about ourselves, because when we heard those words, we felt bad and we believed them to be true .

Like the seeds in our gardens, the seeds we plant with our words will also have a vast and unforeseeable life-changing potential and return on investment.

Let’s choose to speak words that are harmless and words that are helpful and bring about feelings of love for life, for ourselves, and for others.

We send this message with a wish for peace on earth through the planting of awesome seeds that will bring an abundance of good things to all!

Aloha!