If Knowledge Is a Ten, I Start At Minus Seven When It Comes to Gardening

Not long after I married, my husband concluded plants rarely survived under my care. He’d tell people not to give me plants. He said plants sitting beside my kitchen sink would die for lack of water. I felt a little better telling him some of them were plastic… But I guess he’s mostly right. A thriving African violet would do fine for months until I moved it to a slightly different location.  Before long, I try to figure out what to do with the dirt in the pot where it had died. I tried growing a few vegetables in our first garden; my husband said my cucumbers were an embarrassment and instructed me to pick them as early as I could because they were “curly” instead of straight. In my defense, I am thankful I can report that a raspberry patch someone started before we moved in was still bearing fruit when we left four years later.

I should have gardening in my blood. I grew up on a crop and livestock farm. My dad’s parents had orchards, so Dad saw to it that we had a variety of fruit trees. One of the first pictures of my sister and me has us picking cherries in our front yard. For pity sakes, for some reason I just now associated that with Mom’s stern warning about not wandering off with any stranger because strangers might poke sharp sticks in our ears. Don’t go shaking your head. It worked. I had lots of earaches those first few years and fearing a sharp stick in my ear kept me holding Mom’s hand almost every time we went somewhere.

But, back to gardening and my lack of a green thumb. Mom could put a few wrinkled, dead peas and quarter potatoes so their eyes could be buried and eventually we six would be enjoying fresh produce from the garden. Mom really liked gardening and hers were well kept, partly because she liked the smell of turned soil. I remember earning a little money, emphasis upon little, by tapping potato bugs into a can that had a quarter inch of kerosene inside. Dad said we could get a penny a can-ful; obviously we had a lot of potato bugs that year, but even so, do you have any idea how many potato bugs it takes to earn a pack of gum? 

Dad and Mom seemed to experiment with plants occasionally. They consistently convinced our farm to produce the corn, wheat, milo, alfalfa, and soybeans while trying to keep us kids from raising cane. Their experimental crops of strawberries and grapes were sometimes wedged between a stream and a bank at the edge of our east wheat field across from where Dad grew up. Dad experimented with a peanut crop on or near a creek bank. Mom discovered the sheep ate her onion field before she could harvest it for extra cash. I imagine the sheep belched about each other’s baaaaaaad breath for a while, too. But I relate these instances to cut my excuses for not being a good gardener.

When Paul and I moved to a rural parsonage, I decided I needed to use up part of our large yard for a garden. Like most enthusiasts with a fresh idea, I went to town and bought a hoe. I came home ready to turn the soil upside down. I swung the hoe into the dirt and watched it leave me holding the stick. The bright red blade was on strike and took off. I went back inside to pursue my next bright idea, thankful there were people in our church who liked supplementing Paul’s salary with produce from their gardens.

Incidentally, an inferior tool is a good excuse to find another hobby. A right tool does make a HUGE difference.  At that point, my brother had not set up his business. The Prohoe garden tool is not going to fly into separate pieces and unsolicited testimonials let those who work with soil know they are about to purchase a tool they’ll not want to leave lying around. But I didn’t have that hoe when I got all enthused about gardening. 

By the way, Loren’s business now makes over sixty kinds of tools that move dirt, weeds, or whatever is in the pathway. He has garden and field hoes, fire tools, scrapers, and more and each is made from a recycled steel implement disc. You might want to check out his website – I’ve seen grown men ooooh and ahhhh over those tools and I’ve talked to successful women gardeners who declare that the family understand the Rogue hoe she has is hers and it will be protectively put away after each use. I’ve heard people say that Rogue tool is not one to leave out because it tends to walk away. Here’s a short video of a gardener demonstrating one of his favorite garden tools. And I’ve watched an unsolicited YouTube video of a fireman choosing Loren’s fire tool over a well-known fire tool. (Keep praying for those brave fire fighters battling fires in many states.)

But back to why I’m blogging today. Last June, on our anniversary, Paul and I worked in our yard. Paul was determined we had to get rid of some old wood in our shed and worse, still, some that had been taunting us, well, really just him, since he took down a swing set/sort-of jungle jim/pirate ship wannabe. The swing and the sort-of jungle jim were from when kids lived here. The jungle-jim-turned-pirate-ship, well, the pirate left for the mission field after he realized pirates were not really very nice role models, but as recent as last May an old neighbor talked about walking by and wondering about the pirate flag in what would become our yard. That former pirate is still one of our favorite people on earth and, I’m happy to report, is living a responsible and well-respected life.

So, getting on with this, because you and I both have other things to do today… Anyway, on our anniversary, I worked in the shade (my medicine says to) and built a fence out of old wood. I love using a hammer because the result lasts so much longer than, say, using a spatula or a hand mixer. When my good man said I wouldn’t get it done as quickly as I said I would, well, I did. I even used nail holes in the old wood to speed up the process! And the fence still stands! Okay, it’s really just a decorative gate blocking what used to be the ugly part of our yard from the view of passers-by. But it’s a fence that has convinced birds to sit on it and our dog has thought about calling it hers, but so far it has served its “re-purpose”.

During the anniversary in our yard – yes, I do mention “anniversary” a few times, don’t I? Hmmm – while other couples married as long as us were out dining on prime rib, my husband began building a raised garden bed. Me, building fences. He, raised garden bed. Actually, if you were to ask him, he’d say the garden bed was because his wife had been saying, “garden bed, garden bed” for a few years. And he’d add, rightly so, that his wife’s medicine says to stay out of the sun, so a garden bed is, in reality, another thing for him to take care of. And, when you peel the onion to its core, he’s right. BUT, that day we did get a raised garden bed formed. Then, since there’s no such thing as a free garden bed even if you use up old wood to start the project, he had to buy the whatever-you-put-in the garden bed. I am madly in love with my good man but you would smile if you knew how he said something like, “After all I am putting into this, whatever we plant had better grow!”

He scared the tomatoes out of the soil! It wasn’t quite that “magic”. First, we kept dripping coffee grounds and egg shells across the counter so we could add them to peelings from purchased vegetables because, if we get enthused about gardening, we’re going to do it right. We composted! At first we did it with a can. Then an old bucket, and finally with a brand new bucket with a lid because, well, if you’ve composted you know you have to have keep a lid on things. At first we had it conveniently in our garage. Then we moved it outside the garage. One whiff and you’d know why. Composing stinks!

So, moving on, when the garden bed was finished, I rushed out and bought three tomato plants. One was huge with blossoms galore! I wanted to guarantee success in that garden bed. That plant alone cost about $13. Do you know how many tomatoes you can buy for $13? (Yes, but they taste like cold cardboard, right?) And, not wanting to use up my social security, I also purchased two little tomato plants for a total of about $5. We put my plants in Paul’s composted and mixed bagged soil. So far, our “free” garden bed probably had about $50 worth of preparation for produce working. (Do you know how many cardboard tasting tomatoes you can…?)

So the weeks have passed and it’s getting time to report on whether or not we should have hastily begun gardening. The big, expensiveplant died within a few weeks of being transplanted. We asked, when it saw it down to “hospice stage”, a Master gardener friend and her very knowledgeable husband whose composts could win any competition, why ours was dying. They said we (actually, because my medicine says… it would be my husband… 🙂 ) might have watered too much, or too little. They came over to see it. They concluded they really didn’t know why a plant dies, but our expensive tomato plant is now deceased. Oh, it did drop two teeny tomatoes before it died, but they looked kind of strange so we just brought them inside until it was past time to throw them away. I think we thought the other one of us might decide to eat the tough little bugger but neither of us did. 

The good news is, and I’m sure you were wondering if there would be in this post, that the two cheap plants are producing tomatoes like crazy! One is loaded with the small, cherry-type tomatoes. They’re all green so we’re hoping they have the good sense to turn the right red before Jack Frost drops by… but that tiny plant has grown into a busy and has probably thirty tomatoes on it. The other tiny plant sprung up sturdy, too, and it has the larger tomatoes coming on nicely. I see lots of those on it. We’ve put supports along side the garden bed, carefully easing the wire-y cages under the plants so we wouldn’t break them but to support their heavy crops. We’ve tasted a couple of the riper tomatoes and they’re not cardboard!

Now, of course we had more compost in the stinky bucket than we could use on the garden bed. I had scraped the oozing cantaloupe seeds into the bucket and watermelon rinds, etc. When Paul works with the compost, his hands stink and the place where he puts the compost stinks. But, hey, he’s a good gardener. I ordered off a very reliable ad on a social media … what is to become, they said, cherry bushes that will produce lots of tasty cherries. When they came, four of them because I do know a little about pollination… a very little… I expected the Fed Ex guy to struggle under the weight of them. They came in a box smaller than a shoebox. Four twigs. Brown twigs. But, the optimist I am, we planted those $35 twigs (I think that’s what I paid). And we composted them with our good compost. 

Here’s the latest on them. SO far they look at lot like they did when they arrived last spring. Twigs. Protected by a cardboard tube from a used up toilet paper roll. Yep. I’m a gardener. But, Paul’s compost has made a huge difference. We have vines all over the place around those expensive cherry bush twigs! And, count them, we have now six cantaloupes maturing, hoping to finish before Jack Frost comes to our yard. And those new cantaloupe didn’t cost us a dime . . . we were going to just throw the seeds away and instead we have produce growing!

Now, if our anniversary had been in April instead of late June, our tomatoes and our cantaloupe might not be worrying about cool nights and cool days. But, maturing into fruitfulness does take time. We’ve all tasted, with regrets, the not-yet-ready tomato and the still tough cantaloupes that we went ahead and bought because we weren’t taking time to nurture fruit we could produce. So we will watch and wait for the harvest we think we’ll have in our backyard. We started out at about a  “Minus Seven” on knowledge about gardening, but we’re improving and next year, we’ll likely start earlier and wiser.

I don’t think it’s a stretch to apply our gardening experience to how we live out our faith. Jesus talked about gardening when He talked about the vinedressers and about the fields ripe unto harvest, and when He spoke about the different kinds of soil that receives the seed. If we are actual Christ-followers, not just Christ-admirers, if we have been converted and have the Holy Spirit dwelling within us, we better not prevent Him from producing good fruit through us. I love the verse that declares that Jesus chose us more than we chose Him and that Jesus’s reason for choosing us is so that we would bear fruit. You can read it in a variety of translations, but you can’t come to a different conclusion than that we are to bear fruit if we are the Lord’s. 

So, what fruit are you seeing today?