Kendra was handing out the ‘Backyard Pollinator Kits’ by the kindergarten door on Tuesday, cheerful in a linen apron the room-parent budget definitely paid for, and I asked, very politely, if she knew the seeds were coated in neonicotinoids. She said, ‘Brooke.’ Just that. ‘Brooke.’ Then she sighed with her entire ribcage and handed one to Cleo anyway.
The kit is a resealable plastic sleeve — one plastic — inside a compostable-looking envelope that is not compostable, per the fine print — two plastics — with a little wooden stake stapled to a laminated QR code — three plastics if you count the laminate, which you should. The seed blend is ‘regionally sourced,’ which I have learned means ‘sourced from a region.’ The company that packaged it, when I traced it back four holding companies deep on my phone in the car line, is majority-owned by a firm that also manufactures the exact chemical the seeds are coated in. Kendra.
I posted about it in Pollinators Deserve Better Than This — one of the more clear-eyed groups I’m in, about 14,000 women, most of them very literate about soil — and within an hour a woman in Vermont had traced the coating back to a plant in Missouri. Another woman posted the SDS sheet. A third woman, who I’m pretty sure is a retired chemist though her profile just says ‘wife, mother, warrior,’ explained that neonicotinoids don’t wash off. You can rinse the seed. The seed remembers.
My sister-in-law Aubrey, who works the front desk at a pediatric allergy practice in Charlotte and is therefore around a lot of very informed pediatricians, said she ‘wouldn’t let a child anywhere near’ a seed coated in that, and reminded me that bees are, and I’m quoting her exactly, ‘basically a canary.’ She also said the kits smell like a hardware store, which I hadn’t noticed but is now all I can smell.
So Bram and I drove out to the county easement past the reservoir with paper envelopes and I let him collect black-eyed Susan heads from the ditch where the mower missed, which is technically foraging on public land but the state doesn’t answer emails, so I’m treating that as tacit permission. Wren stayed home with Otto and made little seed packets out of used parchment paper, which is, if you think about it, the true Earth Day craft — something the room-parent budget could not conceive of because it did not come with a QR code.
Peter says the school kit is fine. Peter also drinks LaCroix, so I’ve stopped taking his food-and-environment inputs at face value; the aluminum can lining alone is a whole conversation I’ve made peace with not having again this year. He carried the kit inside anyway and set it on the counter next to the mail, where it is now emitting whatever it emits into the same three feet of air where the fruit lives.
Kendra caught up with me at pickup Wednesday and said the kits were donated by a ‘local grower,’ which — I looked it up — is technically true in the way that a Walmart is technically a locally-owned business if you count the fact that it’s on a local road. She said the school didn’t have the budget to source anything else. I offered to donate a hundred packets of foraged native wildflower seed from the ditch. She said she’d get back to me. She has not gotten back to me.
Cleo planted her kit anyway, in a pot on the porch, because she is six and Kendra is her teacher and I am not going to be the mom who makes Earth Day sad. I did label the pot, though. Not the plant — the pot. In pencil. So it can be composted later, when the science comes out.