Since moving into my home about four years ago I have kept a
vegetable garden. The project has been
hit with a lot of misses. Tomatoes have
been our biggest success.
This is the
nature of gardening/farming. You learn
your ground, your climate region, and you learn that even if you do everything
right, you are still not in control of everything. God makes rain, or no rain, and I can’t do a
thing to affect that.
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| From spring 2010 "YUM!" |
The joy of gardening deserted me several months ago. Personal challenges, first emotional then
physical prevented me from taking any joy in my garden and recently when I
looked up, I realized that my garden was terribly neglected and in turn, so was
I. The idea of consuming food that I
grow is even more imperative for me these days with the high cost of gas and
the resulting increase of the cost of fresh produce, and also the fact that I
have very nearly converted to vegetarianism of the tentative ovo-lacto kind. (Have you seen the movies Food Inc. or
Fresh? Watching these movies has been
life changing for me, but that is another story.)
In the last few weeks I have carefully chosen and ordered a
ton of new seeds and I’ve plans for a lovely winter garden of grand scale which
will include beans, spinach, kale, collards, cauliflower, broccoli, squash, lots
of herbs, and a ton more.
Despite recent drought weather here in Southern Texas, on
Thursday morning after pre-fasting breakfast at about 0600 before the sun came
up, I shoveled and tilled a small plot of earth and planted my first spinach
seeds of the fall season. Insha Allah, more
seeds will go into the ground as the weeks pass. While I was doing this, in the dark, while being
bitten by mosquitoes, with my daughters gabbing on the patio in the background,
and the three little kittens and their momma that have made my patio a home and
oasis for the last couple of months eating our leftover eggs, I was suddenly
overcome by a great sense of peace and satisfaction.
I am doing something
right. This is the thought that came
to me. Mind you, I am not making a value
judgment here and in no way do I want to come off as arrogant, but it came to
me that I was not just doing a
service to my health and the health of my purse, but also to God. I was actively flipping the switch/turning
the tables, by becoming a producer and not a consumer. I was taking care of myself and family, but
also the greater world that we live in.
I also got some much needed exercise, communed with my daughters and
with nature, and created a trusting bond with skittish kittens.
I was worshipping God in a new way.
Since then, I have repotted an overgrown sage plant, giving
about a third of it away as a gift, repotted a very leggy, woody, and overgrown
thyme plant, and potted a fragrant lavender seedling. I’ve been collecting a ton of new recipes and
bookmarked terrific food blogs and sites.
Also, I have decided to start sprouting right in my kitchen for a yummy,
easy, and new way to add cheap, fresh and organic vegetation to my family’s
diet. I am imagining an entirely new way
of living in this world of mine, and it’s all good. The excitement for my garden has returned and
in the process I’ve gained a greater connection with God.
Is it time to start planting? It's so hot, it's hard to think about "fall" gardens, but it sounds like you know more about it than I do.
ReplyDeleteThere's a lot of wisdom in this post. I believe that a lot our society's dysfunctions come from our disconnect from both the planet and from useful work. Not that our jobs are useless (far from it!) but many of us do work that is several times removed from any obvious outcomes. Add in the fact that we spend so much of our time in concrete buildings or speeding along concrete roads in metal boxes, and you end up with a serious disconnect from the world that was created for us.
Gardening would probably be very good for me. Not so good for the plants, though. Plants seem to do better when I leave them alone. :-)