Lessons from the garden

One of my new passions since we moved into our new house is gardening. For many years I have spent time wishing for the space to be able to cultivate whatever little plants that my heart desired, and finally that time is now! It is really wonderful to be able to realize a little dream.

Now when I first dreamed of my garden to be, I did not know if I would be any good at it. After all my brother was the only one with a real knack for gardening, apart from my two granfathers, in our family. So, it really could have gone either way.

So I set out with planning my plot. I staked out (with Alex's help) a 8ft by 8ft garden plot. Then I went and bought a lot of soil enrichment. The soil in our area is not know for being garden friendly so it needs a lot of help before it can be of much use. This brings me to the first lesson from my garden.

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Do you know what it was that I mixed into my soil to make it suitable for growing helpful and delicious plants? I mixed in composted manure. Probably not a huge surprise, as manure has been used for centuries to fertilize farm plots. But there is a deep significance to it as well.

Most of us want our lives to be full of usefulness, of beautiful plants so to speak. But is your soil of your heart sandy? Does it need to be enriched?

Secondly, manure, is not a very pleasant item when it is fresh. You could compare it to trials and hardships that we must face in our lives. It is those trials and hardships that enrich our lives moreso than our successes. However, before the manure can effectively nurture the soil and thereby the plants it has to compost or mellow out for a while. That takes the stink out and makes for a very fertile soil. Frequently, the horrible and sad times of our lives, once they have a chance to mellow, become the fertile soil out of which beautiful blessings and lessons can grow.

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Second lesson from my garden: Watch out for the weeds.

Every garden gets weeds at one time or another. I am sure that you could easily think of your own extrapolation for an example from this. However, the thing that hit me was a little bit less obvious. Where do you think that the weeds in my garden grow best?

Believe it or not, the weeds in my garden grow the best directly underneath my "good"plants shade. What can I learn from this? Frequently weeds of bad behavior, of bad habits, of carelessness can find shelter under our "good habits" and begin to grow unnoticed. These bad weeds start to feed on the water and food that you give the "good plants" and go un heeded. By the time they are noticed, they have grown a deep root and are difficult to remove without hurting the good plant. What do you have growing in the shade of your good plants? Weed it out before the root goes to deep.

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Third and final lesson so far: Pruning produces more fruit.

The biblical references to this concept are many, but it never made the same sense to me as it does now that I am tending my plants. Some examples.

I love basil, and so I have many different varieties growing on my back porch in little pots. Every time I want to add fresh basil to any of my cooking I just grab my scissors and go out back to snip of a bundle of the fresh herb. When I cut it off, I usually make a big cut right between two leaves on one of the main stems. Do you know what happens a few weeks later? The two leaves that I cut back to now have turned into two new large shoots, holding many more fragrant leaves of basil.

Did I "hurt" the plant initially? Yes, absolutely, I disrupted its normal way of things. But once the plant adjusted to the change it began to produce more leaves and more stems to make more of the delicious herb that I so love.

Same thing with tomato plants. Once these guys get going they can really put out a ton of leaves. Some times, a plant with too many suckers (or useless branches) will totally forget to make fruit because all of its energy is being taken up maintaining the useless leaves and stems attached to it. So, a way to force more fruit is to trim off the useless leaves and suckers and then voila, tons more tomatoes!

Application to my life? What is sucking the life out of me that I don't see? How can I be pruned so that I can grow mentally, phyically and spiritually? It works for them all. Pruning useless activities, pruning unhealty foods, and pruning sinful habits...It all produces an abundance of fruit when done faithfully.

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I hope that you have enjoyed the lessons that I have learned so far from my garden. Maybe they can inspire you the way that they have inspired me.