Fruits from my Garden

I grew up in Amarillo, Texas during the '50's. On my block several people had gardens. My next door neighbor had beautiful roses growing along the fence and a small area with tomatoes at the back of her yard. Three other families had half of their backyard filled with their gardens. One year my mother filled our backyard with a garden. While I don't remember her canning that year, I do remember the jars of pickles. I also remember that it was so much work, she didn't do that again . . .

When we bought our first house, one of the neighbors was an energetic gardener. My first garden plot was probably 10 feet by 10 feet. My neighbor, Betty, had a Troy built Tiller that I was able to borrow and I enlarged the initial space. She and I would visit a nearby stable to clean stalls to take home fresh manure to enrich the soil. I also added the fallen leaves when we tilled.



When we moved to Hutto, I had a much larger garden. I had a tiller that had its own motor but was pulled by my small yard tractor. I had a load of cow manure and sand dumped to enrich the soil. I have fond memories of cooking fresh new potatoes and fresh broccoli. My sister-in-law had some great pickle recipes. I also remember pickling watermelon rind, making green tomato chutney, and even pickled squash.

When my daughter entered school, Girl Scouts became a big part of our life. The annual cookie sale coincided with the time I normally got my ground ready for the cool weather crops and the garden faded away for lack of time.



With the economy so poor this year, I wanted to do a garden again. I rented a tiller and my daughter helped me get the ground tilled. While it was the same area where I used to garden, I went ahead and added "Back to the Earth" soil compost so the soil would be rich and fertile. Yellow squash has been my bumper crop. I quickly decided that if we weren't going to eat it that day, I needed to be freezing it. I've got LOTS of squash in the freezer. And . . . the squash keeps coming and coming and coming . . .



The cucumbers were prolific as well. I've made sweet pickles, refrigerator bread and butter, and hot dill pickles. Fortunately, the cucumbers have slowed down with our 100+ temperatures. When I went out this morning, it looks like I'll have enough cucumbers for a small batch of sweet pickles or the bread and butter ones.



My gardening season is nearing an end. While the tomatoes are still green on the vine, we'll be heading up to Amarillo for a wedding and on to Montreal for Anticipation, Science Fiction Worldcon. With this summer's record breaking heat and water restricitons that make automatic watering difficult, my garden will be dry and shriveled when I get home. But, it has been a glorious garden - one to remember!

The Weeds in my Garden - Part 2

My friend, David who gardens in Zambia wanted to see photos of my garden. I have to confess that my first thought was: "I don't want anyone to see my garden - it is not a showcase, it is not "neat & tidy." Several things made me change my mind. I HAVE worked at weeding my garden. Trust me, without weeding, the entire garden would filled with three or four feet tall Johnson grass. A busy schedule resulted in my first real weeding happening after the Johnson grass had staked its claim on my garden. Over several days, I weeded separate sections and used the hoe to further break up the soil. This gave my garden plants the opportunity to get ahead of the Johnson grass. There were a few areas around the peppers and onions that did not get well weeded and are still somewhat choked, but I worked around the peppers this week. And while I planted onions, spring is not the best time to grow onions in Central Texas. I've harvested a few and I need to check better and get whatever ones actually made onions.

Make no mistake, even though my garden is productive weeds and all, weeds are not a good thing for a garden. Weeds can choke out or shade your valuable vegetables and fruits. Weeds steal water from the ground that your good plants need. Weeds are easier to pull when they are small and the ground is still soft from tilling.

Practical things that I am not good at:

My friend, Debbie Rivas, had a life motto: Do a task while it is still "little." In the best of all worlds, one should spend 30 minutes a day weeding parts of the garden. I confess I get busy doing other things and don't allocate that daily time. And, you have to realize, I have the "hare personality." I work very, very hard at one time on a project and then I rest or go on to another project. "Tortoise personalities" are better at doing a little bit of work every day and keeping tasks small on all their projects. But I've learned that there are advantages to being both the tortoise or the hare. I have learned to accept that I am a hare and to work to make the most of my personality type.

Weeding regularly also helps keep the ground around your valuable plants cultivated and loose so that weeds are easier to pull.

The Spiritual Lesson:


I talked in my last blog about how my life was productive even with the weeds that are part of my life. I also believe that because I am human that my life will always have some weeds in it. My garden can survive with some weeds, but it can't survive if it becomes overrun with weeds. Likewise, I can function in life with some of the weeds, but I must actively pull weeds from my life to keep both my spiritual life and my daily life from being taken over by unprofitable habits and weaknesses. The weeds in my life can fill my time and prevent me from getting the important tasks done. The weeds in my spiritual life can choke out the positive things in life, steal the living water from my heart, and shade me from the Creator's light.

Each era of life has a different set of weeds to deal with. When I was raising my kids, there was the weed of activity. We all want our kids to be involved - church, scouts, sports, music, drama, etc. The needs for each of these good activities are great and the volunteers are few. So one of the weeds for me was saying yes to too many volunteer responsibilities. Possibly, my kids should have been involved in fewer activities, but that is SUCH a hard call when you want them exposed to so many of the good organizations and a positive things for kids.

Another weed in today's society is video games. In and of themselves, they are not bad. Taking time for relaxation and recreation is important. Video games can provide an outlet from our mundane and tiresome tasks. But many games have addictive elements and many people find themselves or their children spending far too much time playing video games instead of exercising their minds, bodies and souls. Time spent on video games robs time from productive daily tasks, time spent growing spiritually, and time doing godly work. If you are a game player, keep a time log for a week. I think you'll be surprised. Or do a video game "fast."

The internet is a wonderful thing. We can keep up with our far away friends, read the latest news, pursue hobbies, educate ourselves or read/write uplifting blogs. There is so much good information to be found on the internet, it is a very useful tool. But . . . we can become news junkies, Facebook junkies, Facebook game junkies, etc. Going through the book, "The Artist's Way," I recently did a week where I did a reading "fast." While I didn't completely abandon the internet, I limited the surfing I usually do each day - news reading, forum reading, blog reading, Facebook, Twitter, etc. It was amazing how much time that freed up to do other creative and productive things.

Conclusions:

I want my life to be productive. I don't want to become a "perfectionist" in any part of my life. I want to accept my own weaknesses and human limitations. But, I also do not want weeds to take over my life and to choke out the good things I can do and should be doing.

Here are some of the products that came from my "weedy" garden. They can survive some of the weeds, but without weeding I would not have:

Yellow Squash:



Bell Pepper


Tomatoes


Watermelon


Green canteloups


Almost ripe canteloup



What are the "weeds" in your life? What are the productive and spiritual things that you want to cultivate?

The Weeds in my Garden

It has been a long time since I've had a garden, but for several reasons I am doing a garden this year. I planted radishes, peppers, tomatoes, onions, yellow squash, green beans, cucumbers, honey dew melons, canteloup, and watermelon. I usually do a pretty thorough job preparing the soil - this year adding a lot of "Back to the Earth" compost when we tilled under the grass. I put in simple furrows and got everything planted. I was blessed with a wet spring and I found a way to automate the watering (which is going to have to be modified now that we are under stage 2 water rationing.)

When I gardened years ago, I remember having great production from my garden plants inspite of the ever present weeds. I always seem to have many projects going on at once, so my time is never completely dedicated to the garden. And we have Johnson grass which can be a royal pain to get rid of. Tilling the soil does not get rid of Johnson grass and the rich watered soil provides a perfect environment for each root segment to sprout grass stems that can get up to 3 or 4 feet tall.

I have done some weeding this year, but the edge around my garden is marked with a tall Johnson grass fence that I kept hoping I would get mowed down. Problem is I have vining plants, so now it is probably impossible to mow without damaging them. The inside of the garden has the weeds a little better under control, but they are still there. A perfectionist gardener would be appalled. After all, weeds take nourishment from the good plants. And, there is an inner voice speaking not so softly into my mind: "A good gardener would have a weed free garden."

Saturday evening I picked 20 yellow squash - some pretty big. Tonight I picked another 11 squash. I'm blanching them and putting them in the freezer because those plants are making squash faster than we can eat them or share them with Jonathan and Debra. I'm getting into the rhythm of preserving - pickling, freezing, making jam (I bought the fruit.) The tomatoes are just beginning to start turning red and we get just enough green beans to either eat or put up a few bags in the freezer. The cucumbers are also going gang busters - I've working on my 3rd batch of sweet pickles. I've made 1 gallon of refrigerator bread and butter pickles and 4 quarts of "hot" dill pickles. I'm hoping to do one batch of the red cinnamon pickles and at least one or two more batches of bread and butter pickles. I'm also hoping to get enough tomatoes to do a bunch of jars of canned tomatoes. The peppers have been slow, but they are beginning to make green bell peppers. The melons all have fruit, but none are ripe yet.

My weedy garden is actually producing quite well. I've been thinking that there are probably several object lessons with this weedy garden. I'm a human being and my spirit has weeds as well - those areas of my life where I'm not perfect, areas of my life where sin is lurking, areas of my life where my habits and routines are poor, and areas of my life that need improvement. And, I believe that no matter how hard I try this will always be the case, because I am a human living in a fallen world.

The weeds in my garden give me hope. God is my master gardener. He knows which weeds really need to come out to keep from choking my spiritual growth and which ones can be removed later. He can fertilize my spiritual soil, loosen the dirt for my roots to grow deeper, and rejoice over the productive things that I am able to accomplish in spite of those pesky, weedy weaknesses. I am an imperfect creature with probably as many internal weeds as my garden has. But I know that God has used me in special ways sometimes because of some of those weeds. I need to use an encouraging voice to myself pointing out those good, successful things that do bear bountiful fruit.

Love the Weather Here!

Here in southern California along the coast, the weather at the fourth of July is amazingly cool. We wake up in the mornings to a cool breeze coming in the windows and clouds and fog in the sky. Yesterday it was in the 60's most of the day. Today, we started with clouds. The sun came out in the early afternoon, for those beach lovers to have a wonderful afternoon. Then the low clouds started rolling in around sunset. The talk at Curves today was whether it would be clear enough to see the fireworks.

Henry tells me that at home in Texas the temperatures have been over 100 degrees every day this week. I have to say I am enjoying the cool weather here. As warm natured as I am, the nights are cool enough that it feels good to sleep with Debra's heated mattress pad. I even try to turn it on ahead of time - so it is cozy when I crawl under the covers.

We've been apartment looking for Debra. A lot of the places we looked don't have air conditioning. If this is typical weather, I can see why you would not need it.

No wonder all the garden plants look so beautiful here - they are not having to fight the heat.

Well, I'll enjoy this while I can. I'll be back in Texas in a week or so. Then this weather will seem like a dream.