“How to Grow…” is a series of short films documenting ways of growing food in a 72 micro-season Chinese Calendar year. This project is an introductory foray to archiving growing practices, starting out with my initial attempts to plant vegetable seeds in February 2025. It seeks, in the first place, to gather together a little of the information we have upon the observed ways of growing. Through growing, I came to appreciate the precarity of food cycles and to engage more closely with seasonal time. By observing the subtle changes in nature through a micro-seasonal framework, it offers a way of paying closer attention to the world as a patchwork of entangled ways of lives.

HOW TO
GROW
GAI LAN (芥蓝)
CHINESE BROCCOLI

HOW TO
GROW
KANG KONG (蕹菜)
WATER SPINACH

I started planting seeds in February 2025 on my 8m2 balcony in Berlin, Germany, with a wooden planter box, five bags of soil, compost, seed trays and some gai lan (芥蓝), kang kong (蕹菜), pak choy (白菜) and red chilli (辣椒) seeds. This project began with my attempt to grow Asian vegetables that were not easy to find in grocery stores in Germany. As a beginner to gardening, I looked up “How to Grow…” videos on YouTube, while adapting to Germany’s seasonal context. I learned to sow seeds in late February to early March, and waited for the warmer days in May and June to plant them outdoors.

Seeds first germinate with water and cold. Keeping the seeds in the refrigerator wrapped in a wet paper towel for a few hours kicks off a process called stratification – a period of cold temperature needed to break dormancy.^[1] As the seed’s coat softens, the tough outer case splits open sending down a root and sprouting its first leaves. Now photosynthesis begins, the process by which plants capture the energy of light. The green chlorophyll in leaves mixes with carbon dioxide in the air and water through their roots, synthesizing glucose and oxygen. Glucose is either used by the plant or stored in starch. Oxygen that is released into the atmosphere allows us to breathe.

Since moving to Germany from Singapore (a country without much local food production), I realized how little I knew about growing food and agricultural cycles. Growing was a response to this loss of local knowledge on how to live with appreciation of natural resources. It taught me the value and precarity of food and to respect the ecosystems that produce it. I found out that growing our own food can help us detangle from a fast-paced, consumption-oriented system that wrecks so many plant, animal and mineral lives.

Through planting seeds, I came to engage more closely with the seasons. I noticed that swallows return when cherry blossoms bloom. Mushrooms appear where a tree has fallen. Tomatoes ripen with prolonged periods of rain. As these temporal intersections surfaced, they brought to light how seeds grow in transformative relations with other living species. Plants have developed an exceptional number of ways to disperse their seeds and protect themselves. Some seeds only germinate after they have passed through the gastrointestinal tract of other animals. Others ensnare passing creatures with thorny burs. Others again, lure insects with intoxicating aromas or alkaloid stimulants. Understanding this web of interdependence that governs the natural world teaches us how to grow. As a German weather lore (Bauernregel) states,

“If you see the yellow flowers outside in March, you can confidently sow seeds.”
“Siehst du im März gelbe Blumen im Freien, magst getrost du Samen streuen.”^[2]

When is the right time to plant seeds? Where is it well-lit enough to place them? When will their fruits be ripe for harvest? I came across these questions in my balcony garden. From the start, the red chill (辣椒) seeds didn’t germinate. The gai lan (芥蓝) seedlings were also tricky. Too little water and they’d shrivel, too much light and their leaves grew too quickly for their stems to hold their weight. Then, aphids came. It was a challenge to protect these vegetables from lurking threats. But even after ordeals with pest and mold, the seedlings showed me how resilient they could be. They taught me to be patient, how to take time to heal.

With berries and exotic produce conveniently available on supermarket shelves all year round, we’ve grown used to the high-speed, on-demand food production systems that afford us these luxuries. Growing plants from seeds shows us the precarity and longevity of natural food cycles. Seeds such as avocado take years to bear fruit, live on a different time scale and cannot be grown hastily. This contradicts the fast-paced food industry which disregards the precariousness of natural food cycles in order to achieve growth-driven, linear-oriented goals. As Anna L. Tsing highlights, “The history of the human concentration of wealth through making both humans and nonhumans into resources for investment. This history has inspired investors to imbue both people and things with alienation, that is, the ability to stand alone, as if the entanglements of living did not matter.”^[3]How could we better adapt to the less harried, generative time of plants?

[5] Hovane, Mark. “The 72 Micro-Seasons” Kyoto Journal.

In search of a slower way of counting time, I came across the 72 Micro-season calendar based on the Chinese Agricultural Calendar (农历).^[4] It divides the year into 72 Micro-seasons based on the 24 solar terms, each about 15 days long. The four seasons are split into six terms, each term splitting into three micro-seasons that last around five days each. In the past (around 1949), this system helped people to appreciate and predict the subtle changes in nature throughout the year, offering seasonal allegories through which people could understand nature’s obscure rhythms.

For this short film, I borrowed the micro-season framework to make sense of the seasonal changes I observed in Germany. The last frost, the appearance of golden daffodils or migratory birds marked significant times in the year. In the endeavour to construct a framework for the seasons, I realized it was a near-impossible task. Is there a day of the year when swallows return? Or a time when insects awaken? Calendars were humans’ attempt to order and predict natural forces that are beyond our control. Nevertheless, observing Germany’s seasonal changes through a micro-seasonal framework helped me to pay closer attention to the world as a patchwork of entangled ways of life.^[6]

The videos in this project do not claim to be an instructional guide, but rather aim to raise the question of how to grow generative, post-consumerist ways of living.^[7] As a project that began with growing fragments of a home away from home, it ends with the hope for finding a home in the natural world, that is not ours to own.

[1] Hanson, Thor. The Triumph of Seeds: How Grains, Nuts, Kernels, Pulses and Pips Conquered the Plant Kingdom and Shaped Human History (New York: Basic Books, 2015), 10-16.
[2] Jokel, Silvia. “Bauernregeln im März.” Äppfelsche. [date accessed 15.6.2025] https://www.aeppelsche-homepage.de/bauernregeln3.htm
[3] Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 5.
[4] Banwo, Adetoro Olaniyi. “Historical Analysis of Calendars-Chinese Calendars and World Calendars.” Asian Journal of Research in Social Sciences and Humanities. Vol 4(11) No. 114 (2014): 9-14.
[5] Hovane, Mark. “The 72 Japanese Micro-Seasons” Kyoto Journal. [accessed on 11.07.2025] https://kyotojournal.org/uncategorized/the-72-japanese-micro-seasons/
[6] Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 4.
[7] Kate Soper argues the case for “embracing a post-consumerist (and ultimately post-growth) way of life by foregrounding the pleasures this might bring us.” Soper, Kate. Post-Growth Living: For an Alternative Hedonism. (Brooklyn: Verso, 2020), 4.

by Jeannette Pang 如燕 HOW TO GROW...

by Jeannette Pang 如燕

HOW TO
GROW...