Scar tissue

I finally pulled up all my Brassica stalks: the broccoli, the cavolo nero and the collards that have kept going, and kept us going, over the late winter/early spring months. I'm always sorry to do this, they have been so heroic, but the space is needed for other crops. 

The woody stalks are marked with scars where the lowest leaves  wither and drop off as the plant extends upwards. They seem to me rather poignant. 
Reading A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit I find this passage:

“Emptiness is the track on which the centered person moves," said a Tibetan sage six hundred years ago, and the book where I found this edict followed it with an explanation of the word "track" in Tibetan: shul, "a mark that remains after that which made it has passed by - a footprint for example. In other contexts, shul is used to describe the scarred hollow in the ground where a house once stood, the channel worn through rock where a river runs in flood, the indentation in the grass where an animal slept last night.”

Meanwhile in the greenhouse next year's broccoli crop has germinated.