Dirt under my fingernails

First harvest. Can you say delicious? I can't think of a better way to give my kids a healthy snack than to send them out to the garden to eat some fresh peas warmed in the sun. They love them!

This year we planted a garden. Again. I call myself an experimental gardener because every year is an experiment. I choose the seeds and plant them with the faith that they will grow. This doesn't always happen. Like my carrots last summer. We planted the seeds and waited and waited and waited. Nada. Good thing carrots are so cheap at the store. This year I thought I'd try Bok Choy. If you've never had it, it 's kinda like a cabbage/lettuce/celery cross. I like to chop it up and add it to my roamine lettuce to give it extra texture and substance. I've had good luck with lettuce varieties in the past so I thought the bok choy would work too. But, nope. It grew, but before it ever made the dense head it is supposed to have at the base, it flowered out and overall was a bok choy bust. Bummer.

But my tomatoes, oh WOW! We planted about 20 starts all over the yard to see if we could get any produce this year. In the past the harvest has been very very slim for tomatoes. Since I don't like to give up because I love tomeatoes, I decided maybe we'd err on the side of overkill this summer. It worked! We will have about 5,000 tomatoes because all of the palnts except 2 are ginormous and producing buckets of tomatoes. The boys have tasted the first ripe cherry tomatoes off of the vine, one of their favorite snacks. so, if all goes well and this fruit ripens before it frosts, we will be rolling in tomatoes. I guess we'll be really prepared if the dog gets sprayed by a skunk. But let's hope that doesn't happen.

You know why I really like to garden? It's a place where you can watch the truths of scripture lived out before your eyes, in your own yard. I can show the truths to my children and we can talk about it, a hands on lesson, many teachable moments at my fingertips. No longer just words in a book, but living (or not, depending on the plant) pictures for them to grasp and hopefully have a deeper understanding of. Jesus used stories of plants, seeds, harvest, and sowing for a reason. He knew we needed the real life examples that we could touch and see to help us relate. If you've never grown something, give it a try. If it fails to grow or if it produces a beautiful plant, you'll have so much to think about in relationship to your spiritual growth and the conditions that surround you. It makes the dirt under my fingernails all worth while.