Gardening Lessons

One of the things we’re enjoying about living in this part of the country is that if you drop a seed in the ground, it usually grows. Some people disagree with me on this point, and to them I say this: You have not lived in Texas.

This year, we’re involved in more gardening projects than we’ve ever been before. For one thing, we’ve never had an extensive vegetable garden planted in the ground anywhere we’ve lived together. We’ve done assorted veggies in pots, to greater and lesser success. (The “lesser” involved squirrels eating our green tomatoes right off our back deck at a rental property.)

Last winter, we tried cold frames for the first time, as I’ve mentioned before. We’ve still got lettuce and spinach from that. Our herbs, transplanted from my mom’s garden last spring, are going crazy.

A few weeks ago, we expanded the garden–complete with a fence to keep out the bunnies–and we’ve planted carrots, swiss chard, bush beans, squash, zucchini, onions, and garlic, in addition to tomato and pepper plants. Oh, and right now we’ve got seedlings of three varieties of tomatoes, three varieties of peppers, and cinnamon basil sprouting in cardboard egg cartons on our window sills.

It is possible we’re being too ambitious.

J has been helping out with the community garden over on campus, and we’ve both been involved in trying to get our church’s community garden off the ground. (In the ground? Out of the ground?)

It all sounds rather glorious to me, and I hope to you, too, because gardening is fun and rewarding. You should try it, even if only on a small scale, if you don’t believe me.

But it’s also hard work. It’s time consuming. It’s muscle building. It’s dirt-under-your-fingernails and bug-bite resulting.

In fact, it’s appropriate that when J looked at the above photo, before realizing it was one of our baby pepper seedlings, he said he thought it was a war-torn landscape.

And new life.

There are lessons to be learned from gardening.

Lessons about community, especially.

Lessons worthy of a series of blog posts.

Stay tuned.