I love shopping for plants and deciding what would look beautiful in my garden. I love deciding the colours and smells and variety that I want. I love the planning that comes before the garden is even started.
I love that Huck and I were able to find enough trellis in other peoples garbage (Ya, that's right!!) to have trellis from end to end on our deck- for sweet peas and peas of course.
I love digging in the dirt and grass and dead and pulling out the things I don't want and leaving in what I do want. I love the ache I feel after a few solid days of turning dirt with just a spade or two.
I love to watch the flowers come up. I love to watch little specks of things that look dead turn into plants after I put them in the ground. I love the smell of fresh turned dirt, the smell of just watered grass, the smell of a recently watered garden. I love the smell of rain and of the spring plants. I love the freshness of every spring smell. The way the house smells because you can finally open the windows without paying an astronomical heating bill.
I am not even to this stage in my garden yet, but I love watching little green sprouts appear and push their way out of the ground. I love the way those little green shoots fight to become what they were meant to and with love and water and sunlight, turn into beautiful or delicious or both things in my garden.
I love pulling out weeds. Even though this may be hard and the least pleasant of gardening jobs, I can see the end result (Flowers and plants and yummy food) and I want it and will put in the effort to obtain it.
Here are a few cool things that I have learned about plants:
1. They grow better in a loving caring environment, than they do in a negative one or even one with no people to influence it. Ya, I'm serious people- Plants, like people, grow more or less healthy because of the emotional environment in which they are placed. (Oh the joys of Social Work text books. lol)
2. Sunflowers are an easy flower to use for spiritual application. A sunflower has a soft "neck" or stem. As the sun travels through the sky, a sunflower will turn its head to follow the sun. As long as the sunflower's "neck" is soft enough it will continue to do this, and it will thrive. A sunflower dies, however, when it becomes "stiff-necked" and stops following the sun. This is the same as us and our spiritual progression- as long as we follow the sun, we are spiritually "thriving", but when we become too stiff-necked and stop following the Son, we will spiritually die. (Luckily, unlike the sunflower, we can change our state and start following the Son again.)
3. Plants only ever become what they were meant to be. A carrot will be a carrot no matter how many of it's cucumber friends tell it that it is a cucumber, it will grow to be a carrot- which is a pretty funny looking cucumber if you ask me- but it will always be a carrot. No matter if the carrot is accidentally mislabelled as a radish or planted in the midst of peas- it will always grow to be a carrot and follow it's divine nature. You are a Child of God. You are not on this earth to be a cucumber, radish, pea or carrot and if you tried, you would do a poor job. But you are here to be a daughter or son of God and you can succeed at that as it is Your divine nature.
4. A carrot that I grew always tasted better than the one that I got from the store. The effort is always worth it- even when birds come and eat half your plants- as they did to me one year. The rest of my garden was extra good that year because I fought for it.
5. Try, try, again. Every year you have the opportunity to start again. If you didn't like what you planted last year, change it. If your bean plants were overcrowded by your strawberries, they can be moved. You can learn and grow with your garden.
6. Don't start giving your dog Popsicle sticks if you one-day want to use them as markers in your garden. He will be very tempted to remove them from your garden and use them as personal chewing sticks as he always has- no matter how much you coat them in vinegar to make them smell bad.
Speaking of spring, Huckleberry has actually gotten into a spring routine already. When I get home, he thinks it is time to go for a walk. Then he thinks it is time to eat, and after that he thinks it is time to go outside and play in the yard while Scott and I garden. What a hard life.
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