If you harvest them when they are small (2-3 inches), they taste like wasabi arugula. Perfect on a steak sandwich. If you let them get large, they taste like fire, but you can sauté them in bacon fat to mellow them into a savory Southern side dish. I know I said I wouldn’t focus on the metaphor, but I have to.

In three days, you will see a tiny green hook emerge from the soil. And I promise you, when you see that tiny hook splitting that tiny seed, you will feel like you could move a mountain.

Take ten of them. Put them in a pot. Water them.

There is something almost laughable about a mustard seed. Hold one in the palm of your hand, and you’ll barely feel it. It looks like a speck of reddish-brown dust. It is, botanically speaking, a overachiever with an inferiority complex.

Here is why planting a mustard seed is the most rewarding, chaotic, and delicious gardening project you’ll start this season. Most vegetables take forever. You plant a tomato in May and pray for a BLT by August. Mustard? Mustard is the caffeine shot of the garden.

We’ve all heard the proverbial saying about "faith the size of a mustard seed" moving mountains. But as a gardener, I’m less interested in the metaphor and more interested in the miracle. You can read that quote in a book a hundred times, but you won’t understand it until you drop one of those specks into a pot of dirt and watch what happens next.