Thoughts from the garden

I am unusually quiet in the garden today, not that I am ever particularly noisy. Perhaps, I am only noticing that I am present.

I pull the lettuce plants that are going to seed and plant spinach seeds. The soil is warm and fluffy, much different than the first spring planting in April.
I pull the pea plants and replant them as well, wondering if there will be enough time for them to come to harvest before the first frost. I plant only one row and space them further apart than the last time, as they had become unruly. While my wood poles and string worked as support in years past, it was not enough this year. I notice the seed packet says to plant them near a hefty fence to support the vigorous vines.

I weed around the cilantro and the Swiss Chard and find it surprisingly easy. I don’t remember doing much weeding in years past once the plants were established. I enjoy gazing at the bed from under the plants and find that the weeds come out easily. I wonder whether I have become a better gardener or whether the soil has just been much improved over time. There is little difference between the two perspectives.

We’re starting to save the daily picking of cucumbers to make another batch of pickles. Perhaps by week’s end, there will be enough for the 16-cup recipe.

I harvest the first of, hopefully, many eggplants.

A chest freezer will arrive next week and I am excited. I have wanted one for some 25 years.

I work among the hum of the bees. I imagine how we work in concert: they make the fruit, I pick it. I am harvesting green beans when the timer indicates it’s time to go. I go into the house, put away the harvest and resume with the rest of my Tuesday work.

Be the change you seek in the world

I think about the sacralization of time as I enter the garden this morning. In order to make my time there special and specific, I set a minute minder for 40 minutes. Yesterday, I set it for 50 minutes and then extended it 20 minutes more. I don’t have as much time as yesterday, and while there is always more to do, simply getting the vegetables picked, plus a little bit of weed management is enough for today.

As I set the timer into my harvest basket, I think of the action of marking time like saying grace before a meal: it is an action that deliberately ensures that one moment, or one activity, doesn’t just slip into the next.

I notice that I am beginning to get to know myself in a friendly sort of way. Understanding that I can be a bit focused on task, as well as a little absent-minded, I take an action that will ensure that I will not leave the timer behind on the fencepost. It’s a new perspective, this being helpful to myself, honoring my foibles and taking the care that I will accomplish what I think that ought to, without ragging on myself for, well, being me.

I have always like Eric Anderson's song "you have to be your own best friend" and I am understanding a bit more what it might actually mean.

The Rev. Dr. Susan Richtie told stories this past week at the Unitarian Universalist Leadership Training Institute of 19th century Universalist women who accomplished an amazing amount of social change because they were able to use their position as non-threatening upper class women. They got bar owners to allow them to hold church services in their establishments on Sunday mornings, the one time there were no patrons there, even as they worked and preached temperance. For them, temperance was not about the evils of being intoxicated, it was about the very real reality of a man spending all of his paycheck on liquor and then not being able to financially support his family.

The stories that we tell ourselves, the language that we use in the privacy of our own minds, very much reflects the way we move within our world. And if we think that the world might be lovelier if it was a little kinder or gentler, I’m learning that I can start with how I treat myself.

The vegetables are picked, the timer is back on its shelf in the kitchen, and I hope that your day is going as well.

With great expectations

I finally planted the cabbage plants. They were straggly three weeks ago, an end of season sale. Today, when I finally made a concerted effort to find room in my abundant and tightly packed garden, I was unsure whether they will actually grow, being much reduced by the wait in their small container.

I admire their fortitude and survival as I place their root-bound bodies in the rich soil. Everything in its time, I think to myself.

I reflect on them as if they are a metaphor for gifts or talents, which often lie dormant, sometimes for years on end. I can only think that when we finally make a commitment to plant them, or develop that which is innately part of ourselves, that we give those gifts the opportunity to come to fruition.

In the end, it doesn't matter when we finally nurture our gifts, or the cabbage as the case may be. It matters only that we do so with intention that they will grow.

I will water the fledgling plants until they have taken hold.