Pushing Through the Crust

On Easter Sunday we had our tighter circle of family out to Hooverville for a wonderful meal.  Grandma, Grandpa, Steven and Miranda,  Tommy and Denice, Mom, Dad, Grant and I, all enjoyed a wonderful meal prepared by my mother.  Ham, deviled eggs, salad, hot rolls, potato casserole and beans made for a delicious spread.

Grandma and Grandpa were excited to be back at home.  The first thing Grandpa did when he got out of the car was take his walker out to the wheat pasture behind the house.  He wanted to see the wheat!

I walked with him as we examined the wheat up close.  He picked a strand and told me the head would come out here in the next week or so.  I always take Dad and Grandpa's word when it comes to farming and gardening, however the back of my mind says they have to be either psychic or magicians to know this stuff.  How can you tell the exact week when your crop is going to pop out of the ground or turn colors?  Grandpa hadn't even seen my garden and he still knew when my potatoes would sprout!

Since we were near the garden I excitedly showed Grandpa the progress my onions had made.  He was very pleased, although I quickly apologized for not having freshly weeded the garden (it had been less than a week, though.)  Nevertheless, Grandpa's seal of approval was on my onions, and that was worth gold!

A few weeks later my potatoes started to bloom.  Dad had told me to keep the ground wet so the plants could push through the crust.  I was fascinated as I soon saw exactly what Dad meant. These tiny baby plants were literally pushing their way through the hard outer shell of the earth and into the fresh air.  For weeks I had been hoeing around plants that I couldn't see.  To be honest, I wasn't even sure if I was hoeing in between the rows or not, but by good faith I did it anyway.  Slowly but surely one plant after another began to pop up, and it seemed like overnight they would arrive.

The whole idea of "pushing through the crust" is amazing to me.  What was once a seed is now moving earth around so they can complete it's purpose in life.  I think that should inspire anyone.  What is the "crust" in your life that you need to push through in order to fulfill your purpose?

In church on Sunday this lesson continued when my pastor spoke on the parable of the seeds in Mark 4.  The farmer used good seed and cast it across the land.  The seed fell on to four different types of soil: hard, rocky, thorny and good.  Each type of soil is linked to the spiritual life of you and I.  The Lord is planting seeds and we hear good words but are they taking root in your life?  Perhaps the seeds are not growing because your heart is hard or because your idols are choking it out.  Maybe you believe the Lord and want to follow him but as soon as a hard time comes you give up.

The good news is, you can change your soil.  You can change the outcome of the seeds.  It is your choice to be good soil, you only have to cultivate your heart in good faith, just as I did my garden.  Remember, it was weeks before I saw results, but the persistence paid off.

Think about what kind of soil you are, and ask yourself what crust you need to push through in order to live the life of purpose and passion that God called you to.  You just mind find a sprout to water.

The Onions Have Been Planted

The first crop of the new year has been planted.  Six rows of delicious onions; 2 red, 2 yellow, and 2 white, have been planted.

I had held off planting for the past few weeks due to several different things.  Grandpa's 90th Birthday Party, lots of freezing rain and snow, and spending more time working on the house.  After the majority of Hoovers left on Sunday morning, I found my time and weather, to plant onions.  The sunshine could not have been more beautiful, and the forecast called for a 50% chance of rain on Monday.

I had never planted onions before and I couldn't quite remember Grandpa's verbal instructions from three weeks back, so luckily Dad was around and he helped me get started.  The equipment we use still makes me giggle.  Two metal posts, some old string and a metal do-hickey are all we needed.  I had somehow thought a rake, a shovel and a hoe would be appropriate.

After stretching the string on the two posts to make a straight line, Dad showed me to poke the metal do-hickey into the ground to form small holes about 6 inches apart.  These small holes are what we drop the onion sprouts in.

My cousin Justin and his family came out to say goodbye when they realized what I was working on.  Justin has a very nice garden of his own back in Arkansas.  We discussed heirloom potatoes and red okra.  He also told me about a plant called Egyptian Walking Onions, which seem to replant themselves each year.  I'd like to see all these plants he described.

Justin and I agree that the best cure for sitting in an office all day is getting down and dirty in the garden.  Plus the health benefits of growing and eating your own food are so wonderful.  He is a few steps ahead of me in that he has been growing for longer and thus has a more expanded garden.  He plants tomatos, onions, peppers, squash and all sorts of things.  He also has a few chickens that provide him with fresh eggs and eventually fresh poultry.  This weekend he brought his fresh eggs with him and made omelets for everyone.  He also brought a big jar of non-pasturized milk he bought off of a neighbor.  It was absolutely delicious.

Originally, I had thought it would be fun for the whole family to get involved with the onion planting, making it a fun event on the farm.  However, the weekend was overly packed with fellowship, food and birthday cake, and everyone was only in for 1-2 nights, so I had to plant alone.  Turns out I didn't mind at all.  The solitude was just what I needed after a houseful of 30-50 people.  At first I thought I would play some music to relax, but then I realized you can listen to music anytime.  Silence is not something you can always get.

What a wonderful feeling it is to be all alone in the middle of nature.  I paused to look around me.  Wheat surrounded me on three sides.  Beautiful, lush, green wheat.  My hands and knees were covered in dirt and to my east I could admire the grand house that so often is filled with fond memories of friends and family.  The cows are usually pretty close to the fence near the garden, but they were off in the distance sun-bathing.  Even the kittens were lounging around in the grass, enjoying the quite sunshine.

I haven't mapped out exactly what all I want to plant this year, but my brother said he will be home next weekend and he has every intention of planting potatoes in the garden.  So I guess I will be finding some potato sprouts this week.

I'd like to try my hand in peppers this year for sure.  I love peppers and fresh salsa would be amazing.  However, if I want salsa I will have to learn the techniques for growing tomatos and those seem threatening because they start upside down.

Squash will be planted again, but this time I will make sure we get summer squash instead of winter.  Okra is a must, but I may not plant as much because that, my friends, was a high-maintenance plant.  Grant also mentioned having a few pumpkins for this fall and we all agreed watermelon was fun to pick on hot summer nights.

I guess I will start thinking about the contents of this year's garden.  As long as I can get help from my friends and family I think I am capable again.  Other than onions and potatoes, the rest of the plants prefer to wait until early May to be planted.

Maybe the Garden Isn't So Bad After All...

Gardening isn't so bad after all.  Maybe I did get a little bit of my grandpa's green thumb in my genes.

Today I picked my first okra crop.  I spent well over an hour and a half in the garden and wound up late for work.  It was 75 degrees and cloudy, a beautiful day to work outside.  I suppose the serenity of it all caused me to lose track of time.  That, and the fact that I had twice as much work to do.

I think gardening is sort of like a video game in that it gets more and more complex with each new step.  When you master level 1 of fighting off big weeds and protecting baby plants, then you move to level two, which is fighting off billions of tiny weeds, watering constantly and still protecting the plants.  Level 3 combines all of this plus evil grasshopper ninjas.  (The secret to that level was finding out about a magical dust that kills off the villain.)

Today I entered level four.  Not only was there big weeds, little weeds and grasshoppers to be fought, but now there was a beautiful menagerie of dead grasshoppers and baby frogs to avoid, plus you have to harvest the crop.  One may think harvesting okra is quite simple.  Well, it is and it isn't.  The picking is easy because you simply break, twist or cut the stem off from the plant and through the fruit in a bucket.  The hard part is knowing when to pick it.  Just like those darn video games, timing is everything.  Pick to early and the fruit isn't ripe, but pick a day or two later and the darn thing is 6 inches long and tough as a rock.

I'm not the hardest working Gardener there is, I'm trying, but my time commitment to the garden has been about one morning a week, sometimes two.  One week ago I tended my garden and was very pleased.  There were lots of baby sprouts of okra, and several small squash plants growing.  It had finally rained a few inches, for the first time all summer!  That rain brought lots of growth, a skip-watering-free card, and the addition of baby weeds solidly covering the earth.  What blows my mind, is less than a week later, the baby okra sprouts are already overgrown and too tough to eat!  Where did the time go?  They grow up so fast...

Luckily it is raining again this week, 1 inch yesterday and it is currently falling outside my window.  We've been in a drought so long I guess I don't actually understand the role of rain.  For the first 2 months of my gardening career I relied solely on water out of a hose for nourishment, but the last two weeks have seemed like a vacation because nature has basically taken care of itself.  I guess that's sort of how the whole thing works, isn't it?  You plant the seeds and help them out along the way, but the end result is up to nature--it's up to God.  Perhaps this is how child rearing takes place too.

I have been pleasantly surprised at the simplicity of gardening.  I am the type who doesn't do anything without reading a book about it first, and when I took on this whole project I had envisioned grandpa being my book, holding my hand through each step of the process until I knew with somewhat certainty what I was doing.  It hasn't been like that at all though, really, with the exception of the first planting and weeding, I've pretty much done everything on my own.  The level of my family's farm and garden expertise is so high that explaining the basics isn't something they can comprehend.  I could tell by the way my elementary questions were handled by my grandpa and dad.  It's like their minds literally could not register the fact that I didn't already know this stuff.

While I love the farm and the earth and all that jazz, I've never really been an A+ farmer's daughter.  I was in 4-H and FFA, but that was all rather socially obligated since I didn't show animals.  I thought about showing a pig once, but dad said I 'd be the one getting up at 6 every morning to feed, water and walk it, so I decided not to.

A large majority of my childhood was spent playing on the farm.  But I didn't drive tractors, collect eggs and milk cows like one might assume.  My cousins and I ran around the open spaces creating forts and houses, games and adventures.  When we were forced to retract inside for dinner (lunch), we would clean ourselves up and eat with the family, afterwards finding new escapades involving grandma's lipstick and old dresses.  My Dad was always on the tractor working hard and the men in the family would assure my girl cousins and I that we needed to help grandma in the kitchen, rather than our dad's on the farm.  So we did, and I'll tell you what, I do know how to make a mean chicken fried steak, but ask me about acres and cattle and I might give you a blank stare.

It's not that I disagree with my spot on the family farm so much as it is that I just don't learn things in a normal way.  I have to see things written out on paper or acted out in front of me.  If we're going to talk numbers of acres and numbers of cattle blah, blah, blah...you better hold your tongue till I have a pad of paper and a pen to take notes on.  Then I need a good hour or so to commit this information to memory.  That's just the way I learn.  Unfortunately, farm life seems to be less educational and more intuitive.  I guess that's what I mean when I say the simplicity of gardening surprised me.  With little to no instruction, each day I show up at the farm with a tank top and some muddy tennis shoes.  I then rummage around till I find a pair of gloves and grandpa's assorted hoes.  After that I pretty well dive into my work.  Each visit presents something different, and each visit I learn something new.  If something odd happens I ask dad or grandpa and they of course, always have the answer.

Actually, I did stump them one time.  Last week after gardening, I cleaned up and got ready for work as usual.  Later that morning I was sitting at my desk when I caught a glimpse of my shin.  I screeched and rolled my chair back from behind the dark interior of my desk.  I blinked hard and my stomach rolled up in a knot as I realized I had large red blotches all over my legs, from knee cap to ankle and from shin bone to the fat of my calf.  Medical things really creep me out, and especially ugly, unexplainable creepy medical things on my own flesh.  Eww.  I looked and I looked and I couldn't turn away even though my stomach was getting incredibly weak.  How awful, how embarrassing, but what was it?  I went home at lunch, eager to show my mom my disgusting news, but she was at sewing class.  So I slapped on some Aloe Vera gel and went back to the office.

It wasn't until late that night I had the opportunity to show my folks what the garden did to my legs.  Horrified, they both asked if it was chiggers.  I had assumed that myself, but because they didn't itch I wasn't sure what to make of them.  Mom suggested I take a benadryl and Dad said the same.  So for a full week, I had to wear pants to work in the Oklahoma July heat of 107 degrees.  It wasn't easy, but I couldn't expose those disease-looking legs.  Fortunately, the bumps eventually went away, and before returning to the garden today I lathered myself in Avon's Skin-So-Soft (an old tradition of our family) and so far, have seen no return of the bumps.  What they were exactly, still remains a mystery.