Marigolds Galore

Sunshine and Flowers

Our garden produced an abundance of good things: tomatoes, green peppers, black-eyed peas, okra, broccoli, sunflowers, zinnias, marigolds, herbs. That is the short list. The garden experiment also grew a most delicious, prized product that I never imagined would spring from this plot of land: connections.  You heard it, connections and these were not from Facebook.

Who would have thought that growing things would provide a smorgasbord of personalities to interact with?  Take,  for instance, a new friend who drove by and stopped one Saturday afternoon.  An older guy, he limped up to the garden’s edge, accepted the invitation to join us and then told the story of the best tasting green onions he had ever had.  It seems a lady he had worked for years ago would fry bacon and then add the sliced green onions for a mouthwatering stir fry.   It was a simple dish you could tell he relished just by the smile on his face and the “oooh, man” comments he made describing it.  He would almost lick his lips when he talked about it.  We got the recipe that day and shared our green onions.  Our next visit, we gave him a client’s recipe for Jalapeno Poppers as we filled his arms with ripe jalapenos picked from plants bent over from the weight of so many peppers.  We saw our friend two or three other weekends over the summer.   As he drove by, he’d see we were working and ease his old 90 foot-long Cadillac into a parking space to stop a while and trade gardening and life stories.

Zinnias for Days!

Or what about the buyer client whose mom is a dedicated and savvy gardener whom I reached out to for insight while trying to follow instructions on planting cucumbers in “hills?”  It was her advice on the zinnia seeds, though, that produced one of the better highlights of our summer project. “Plant those zinnia seeds thick. You will be glad you did,” she said.  Wow! Was she so right.  This wonderful woman shared her wisdom with me and her words flowered into such beauty!  We’ve cut zinnias for everyone we know.  Janice, our office manager and another who spent many weekend hours planting and weeding in the garden, cuts a bouquet every week and graces our office with brilliant color.

Or let’s talk about the client who shared his delight over his mom’s squash and onion casserole one day while we were finishing up a call about the upcoming sale of his home.  By the call’s end,  I had his mom’s number and a charge to find out just how good that dish was. Of course, I called and made another connection.  Since then, his mom and I have shared recipes and a huge bouquet of zinnias that she took home on the day she stopped to check on the sale. Of course, we visited and talked not just business but about our homes and children, and she has promised to send me another recipe for squash that she guarantees kids will eat.

Green Peppers to Share

A good friend visited the garden one day after lunch and picked jalapenos and other veggies to take home.  A great couple visited with Tim and me during a Friday afternoon garden “happy hour”  where we all laughed and squawked over the size of the okra we forgot to harvest.  I gardened one Saturday morning and handed out bags of squash and green peppers to surprised customers who stopped by to drop off their storage or apartment rent.   My friend Janey pulled up and donated a beautiful morning glory from her flowerbed for us to plant which took over one entire bean tepee and “glorified” the garden through July and August.  My parents visited over Father’s Day and left with boxes of squash and cucumbers.  My favorite garden guru, Aunt Clara, came with them and gave me her treasured blessing on my first attempt at gardening.  And Roger, a garden mentor who hooked me into this project with his own garden success stories last summer, traded plant disaster stories with me recently and helped me overcome the end of the summer blues I’ve been feeling. 

My husband and I have spent hours in our garden planting, talking, weeding, talking, harvesting, talking. We’ve worked out business issues, kid dilemmas and shared some treasured time with each other.  He planted pumpkins and ornamental corn late in the season and gave me an update yesterday. Our pumpkins are a bit small, but they are growing!  Maybe they will be ready for Halloween. 

Measuring to Plant

 When we began, I thought this would be a kids’ garden. Our daughter and a friend did measure out the 18” spread with a ruler and a trowel and plant the pepper plants. She did harvest the first tomato and expressed surprise each time a new vegetable appeared, but I found that she was much more interested in playing “office” with an old typewriter and the office intercom system than she was with growing things.  We’d lock the front office door; leave the back door open so we could hear her, and off she’d go into her own garden of make-believe while her dad and I played in the dirt.

Waning now, the garden is looking pretty awful and neglected.  We stopped weeding and are now just harvesting the last of the veggies.  I am a bit sad, now, when I look out and remember the beauty and promise of early summer.  Thank goodness, the zinnias are still growing and hide the detritus from the road. 

Lots of Weeds Too.

Soon, it will be time to mow it all down and put our project to bed for next year.   And next spring, we will be here again, I hope.  While growing a garden has been hard work, it has given me a greater appreciation for the vegtables we eat and for the farmers who do this every year to put food on our tables.  We may have missed many weekends at the lake to pick and put up our produce, yet the satisfaction of growing something ourselves and the richness of the connections we made has planted a seed to start again next spring.

Approaching Fearless with an open heart limping from the past weeks’ events,  I wanted advice and found nuggets of strength.   Lucado takes a look at the fears that envelop us as travelers in this world.  He talks about our fears of failing to keep our children safe, of losing our jobs and homes and our fears of uncontrollable world disintegration.  He also speaks to our daily fears that we don’t matter, that our worries will all come true, that our health will fail and to our fear that God just can’t always offer the unconditional love he promises.   

In Fearless, Lucado doesn’t write that everything in our lives will be okay, and he doesn’t try to explain away the horrible, devastating things that happen to us on earth.  He skillfully weaves one life example after another, one bible story after another, to illustrate lessons to help readers live through fears that, if not checked, will overwhelm and weaken us.   

I’ve underlined line after line of thought-provoking advice to revisit and study on how to deal with fear and worry in everyday life.   Lucado’s advice on managing worry in Chapter 4 is a helpful step-by-step reminder of approaching daily life.   I found myself explaining his “worry-stoppers” to my husband and one of my sons today because I felt they had so much merit.  Fearless is a book I will gladly give to others as one that is helping me work my way through a disheartening time and, I trust, will bolster me in the future when other terrible storms appear.

Lucado, Max.  Fearless.  Imagine Your Life Without Fear.  Nashville, Thomas Nelson, 2009

(Disclaimer:  I received an advance copy of this book for this review.  This was not a paid review.)

Feds steady housing market, perhaps permanently – Washington Times

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One of my fav photos: Ocean of Green - photo by Newscoma

I grew up picking butterbeans, fat red tomatoes, sweet corn and slender green onions from my grandparents’ vegetable plot across the street from their home.  They’d retired from the farm and moved with my aunt to a city house.   No more cows, chickens and well water for these guys.  They did, though, take their garden expertise with them.  A neighbor owned an extra lot.  They grew the vegtables and shared their bounty in exchange for use of the land.

Not only did they share the produce, my grandparents shared their appreciation of growing things.  My aunt, meanwhile, graced the yard with color and variety because she is the flower person.  She is still one big green thumb.  Anything she puts in the ground grows.  Send her a plant for her birthday.  She’ll plant it out back, and it will multiply by the thousands in the next year!  But that is another post.

So, I had a great time growing up of playing in the dirt, gawking at the gross, ugly worms and bugs, relishing the smell of fresh, green onions at the table, shelling peas in a shiny bowl on the porch and sticking my nose up at the pickled maroon-colored beets offered at about every meal.   It must have been a natural progression from all of those childhood memories to now crave sharing a garden experience with my eight year-old.  I wanted her to dig in the dirt and know where vegetables begin.  An idea sprouted.

Five Steps to Start a Kids’ Garden:

Get a plot.  I wrote in an earlier post that there would be a reason our company stayed put in our current location and didn’t move to my dream location.  Maybe the extra acreage next door was part of that plan.  No longer just another acre to mow, this plot of land has a purpose!

Get a tractor.  Great ideas turn into plans when you have the right tools and a father-in-law who loves to work on the tractor.  He puts in the lawns when he and Tim, my husband, build a home.  He plowed up and essentially set the dimensions of our garden.  He plowed the first plot.  Tim plowed up the adjacent watermelon and pumpkin patch.

Dream a bit.  I remember when I bought my first house. I looked through home magazines dreaming that my rooms could look just like the ones in Veranda magazine.  Now, I was gazing through gardening magazines and catalogs coveting lush, green, overflowing gardens with neat paths and bean teepees.  The activity was enough to get the creative juices flowing.  Showed Tim what I wanted, and he laid it out on paper.  Then we took string and flags and made it happen.

Borrow from the library and everyone else.  Gardening for Dummies,  Jerry Baker’s Great Green Book of Garden Secrets , as well as the NGA’s pamphlet, Steps to a Bountiful Kids’ Garden and Food Fiesta pages from the UT Extension office go with me everywhere these days.  Wading through pages of bugs that could annilihate a garden overnight overwhelmed me one day;  however, the lush garden dream transported me right on past that roadblock.  I’m also listening to and keeping a record of all the old wives’ tales I hear.  My father in law, Mickey, said his mom always inserted a nail beside each of her transplants to keep the cutworms away.  Will it work?  I don’t know, but it was an easy task to follow on the broccoli plants.   We’ll see.

Find a kid.  Share is a buzzword now.  On Facebook, you can hit the Share button and send the latest info or link to your friends.  I want to share with my daughter  and her friends the love and appreciation for growing things that my family passed on.  I want to do it in real life and not only with photos on the computer.  There is therapy in this endeavor and a handful of laughs.  Wait until I tell you about laying out an organic weed barrier (old newspapers) during twenty mph wind gusts.  A 48 year-old woman frantically chasing wildly tumbling newspapers across an open field does not a pretty picture make.  But that is another story. 

Cynics, stay away.  My garden may evolve into one big dust bowl.  The hungry bugs may munch everything and leave us nothing but the dirt we started with.  My back may give out from laying out all that newspaper.  But, I may see my daughter’s eyes light up when she pulls that first ripe tomato!  We will see what grows.

Great Resource:  National Gardening Association

The contest is in full swing.

Thanks to the encouragement of someone who truly reaches out to others, I am here ready to learn!

There is still time to attend.  Just check out the schedule of topics and speakers!

http://www.podcampnashville.com/

There was no big celebration planned for Fat Tuesday at the local restaurant, so my husband and I took in our own beads and masks.  We drank a Hurricane and ate “crawfish tails” as an appetizer.  I wasn’t too sure how those little delicious bites were made, so I had to look it up! 

How to Clean & Peel Crawfish Tails– powered by eHow.com

Here’s a recipe and how to cook them.

We spent about an hour and a half celebrating a day I have always associated with the countdown to spring.  It was just a simple meal with the person I love and a toast to winter’s demise.

A friend of mine was reading Eat, Pray, Love, and the story intrigued me.  The glowing recommendation on the cover from writer, Anne Lamott, “A wonderful book, brilliant and personal, rich in spiritual insight,” clinched my decision to read it.   A huge fan of Lamott’s manner of baring her soul, I thought to myself, “If Anne likes it ….”

In the opening chapters, Gilbert highlights the messiness of her personal life.  Sinking to the bathroom floor, one pivotal night, she begs to a higher source for aid and encounters her God.  She admits to the chaos she’s created when she backs out of her marriage and a dream she didn’t want.  She confesses that during her divorce she jumps into another stressful relationship and then struggles to mend her broken heart.  She also talks about the good things that happen.  She decides she wants to learn Italian.  She discoves a Guru and a new commitment to meditation.  Her job takes her on a trip to Bali.  From there,  Gilbert’s spiritual yearnings set a course in motion for a full year of her life.

She decides to travel. Gilbert’s vivid descriptions of her travels made me hoot in laughter in some parts and pause in reflection in others.  She muses on the deliciousness of Italian food and the language and her enjoyment in becoming fluent in both.  She describes her time in a distant Indian Ashram, and how the painful hours-long meditation sessions evolve  into treasured, uplifting gifts.  She relishes the life lessons learned through her friendship with a sweet, sometimes, crafty Balinese woman and an elderly healer.  She tentatively welcomes the attentions of a new love and, overall, offers the reader a thoroughly enjoyable, funny and sensitive story.

Even though lacking in funds and time, I traveled alongside Gilbert by reading Eat, Pray, Love.  I’m glad she shared her journey.   Her experiences pointed out to me how traveling can also mean learning to slow down and pay attention to God’s voice within.    

Gilbert, Elizabeth.  Eat Pray Love.  New York, Penguin Books, 2007.

Happy Friday!