An unexpected metaphor from our family garden failures and triumphs
I’m putting my House and Home series on a slight hold for two weeks because I have had a few topics on my heart and mind that I’ve been wanting to get out on paper. The House and Home series has become a really exciting thing for me to write out. It’s practical and at the same time, convicting, and it has made me take ownership and responsibility for some things that I know to be true but am not always the most reliable to complete. I hope that it’s providing some good takeaways for you in how to find joy inside the walls in your home, as well as strategies to bring about freedom in previous areas of entrapment and anxiety. I’ve got posts on rhythms and routines, as well as a "How To Purge Your Home" post coming up that will be live in January.
But for now, I want to talk about my vegetable garden.
Honestly, I’m not much of a gardener at all. Most of the plants that I try to grow myself do not live very long and I don’t necessarily have a sixth sense for horticulture. I use google and my neighborhood nursery (which I just found out is moving about 20 miles north) for ideas and information, and I’m usually a couple of weeks behind what I’m supposed to be doing to ensure a proper harvest crop at the ideal times for my geographical zone. Basically, I don’t really ever know what I’m doing.
But four years ago, I thought it would be a great idea to build a small edible garden in our yard. I envisioned my children playing around in the yard and stopping to eat a few tomatoes here and there as a snack. I imagined bowlfuls of green beans and fresh cucumber slices in every glass of water I drank, fresh arugula on homemade pizza and chopped up basil for the freshest pesto in town. And while yes, some of those dreams have been realized from my garden...I have one child who eats cherry tomatoes anytime he can find them (even the green ones that he calls grapes and then is very dissapointed). And we’ve made the pesto and the cucumber water, but mostly, my garden has been a tool that God has used to teach me patience and humility, gratitude and relinquishment of the illusion of control.
They were lessons that I never, ever would have expected to come from such a small, silly little garden. I’ll find myself imagining the life of a farmer as I invest my own time and money into the hope of a harvest. Their hopes and fears are all resting on the state of their fields. I imagine how hungry my family would be if we didn’t have the luxury of a grocery store. How long the wait would feel. What if we were dependent on our own garden to feed our family? I’d lived my entire life without ever considering this question. But up until around a hundred years ago, the entire previous history of mankind considered it every single day.
It made me feel disconnected in an unsettling kind of way. As if our generation has no idea what we’re doing or how we’re being sustained.
Growing your own food connects you to the land, the weather, the seasons, the plants themselves. You begin to find that certain plants grow better at certain times of year. Certain plants need certain fertilizers and more water. Others are hardy and will survive a winter freeze or the hot Texas summer sun.
Pruning
All plants need pruning. You have to go in with garden shears and cut off parts of the plant that seem healthy. But if you don’t cut them off, they’ll weigh down the plant and then nothing will grow. The plant will put so much energy into hydrating the extra leaves and stems that it won’t have anything left to produce fruit. (not an exact scientific explanation) Pruning never fails to cause me to think of how God uses all circumstances to refine us. To make us more like his Son.
Pruning hurts. It doesn’t make sense in the moment. It feels wasteful and at times, ignorant. But a week or two later, the plant will appear noticeably stronger and fruit is almost always on the near horizon.
There have been times that I’ve gotten too busy to prune. The plants will get heavy and overgrown. They’ll grow so thick that sunlight and water can’t get into the important areas. The plant becomes so full of itself that the natural elements that it needs are unable to be used and the plant eventually dies out. Plants like this will be lush and green and beautiful, but they never produce fruit. They are never performing the purpose they were created for. It’s never lost on me that I can become just like that plant. Full of myself, sustaining myself and unwilling to allow God to move in my heart with his pruning shears.
Disaster
A few weeks ago in early November, we had three nights in a row of hard freeze. I did what I could to protect my little garden, but despite my efforts, death ensued. I was devastated. Over the past few years, I've found fall to produce the best harvest for me, sometimes into December. So it felt like I had been cheated out of the most prime weeks of my fall harvest.
After the freeze, I went out to clean up the remains of the garden. As I was pulling up dead roots, cutting off dead vines and hearing thuds of dead tomatoes hitting the ground, I symbolically saw them as so many of us see our hopes and dreams that haven't worked out. Our broken hearts...thud. Our failed attempts...thud. Our unwanted circumstances...thud.
Not only do we live in a world where individual and regular pruning is required of us, but also, sometimes a hard freeze will come out of nowhere and knock us to the ground and change our worlds in an instant. It all reminded me of life and how sometimes we work toward a goal that ends up failing completely. Or maybe instead of failing, a circumstance will jolt us into something completely different, leaving us to feel like our previous efforts were a waste. And while failure isn't acceptable in our world today, I think the reality is that it's necessary. We learn how to pick ourselves up, clean up the mess of our failure and move forward with something new. But it still stings. In different levels and intensities. But it stings.
When I was finished and all the dead vines had been cleared, I was left with a huge pile of unripened tomatoes. I sighed and thought of the lost potential. Not just the tomatoes, but the metaphorical losses we all endure along the way. What a waste. I’d planted these little guys back in May and sustained them through the entire summer heatwave. I’d fertilized them and we’d picked some fruit along the way, but nothing like what I’d expected.
But I noticed something else that I hadn’t noticed before the clearing. The mess of the dead vines had blocked from view the few plants that had survived the storm.
The arugula, the cilantro and the rosemary. Oh the rosemary. That rosemary will outgrow this garden no matter what storms come our way.
See some things can't survive. The pruning. The garden pests. The summer heat and the harsh freeze...it’s too much. But some things can survive. It made me think how I’d spent more time and effort on certain plants and neglected others. Might we possibly be focusing efforts in the wrong place sometimes? It’s possible (sarcasm, obviously) that I may have overused the metaphor at this point, so I’ll wrap it up. But since my clean up day, I’ve carried around the prayer that “might my marriage and family be the rosemary”. The plant that is rooted in a firm foundation. The plant that survives the heat and the cold. The plant that thrives despite my imperfect ability to nourish and care for it in the way that it always needs. May it overgrow the limits I put on it. May it never be uprooted. May it be used to bring flavor and pleasing aromas to those who encounter it. May we all have marriages and families that are the rosemary.