Reaping what you sow

 Do you remember the blog that I posted early in the spring on gardening? Well, here we are in the heat and heart of the summer, and my garden has lost its mind and gone crazy.

Dear Phil came and rototilled the garden back in the spring, turning under the soil mixed with an aromatic trailer load of cow manure. Phil made perfectly even rows on which I carefully laid out measured pieces of black cloth evenly spaced so that I could mow between the rows as the weeds proliferated, which I knew they would. I purchased small plants and seeds to put into the rows of black cloth and set up my sprinkler to maintain the correct water supply for my expensive venture into mini-farming.

I am always amazed at the growth of the plants. They went from slow-growing little buggers to an exploding jungle of green. The leaves on my squash plants matched the size of large meat platters. You can be sure that I was out there crawling on my hands and knees, reconnoitering among the plants, spying on the developing yellow and green squash. No way were those squash growing to baseball bat size, not on my watch! I foraged among the plants, plucking the small tender squash and taking baskets-full to church for friends to take home. Oh, I ate a few, but that was all.

Next came the cucumbers which grow up on netting arranged carefully between poles. I babied those shoots, weaving them among the different pieces of string, and sure enough, the plants took hold and grew like English ivy on a stone home.

My eight varieties of tomatoes are just beginning to ripen now. People at church are asking me when they will be ready. I tasted a few of the early cherry and grape varieties. Amazingly sweet. However, those bushes, laden with green tomatoes, are precariously leaning in various directions, stanchioned up by cages, poles, and string. Some of the plants are six feet high.  I’m telling you it’s the manure!

Imagine a cucumber growing on a tomato plant, or poison ivy growing where the cucumbers are supposed to be. I expect to get what I planted, not something different or noxious. I look at the plants in my garden twice a day, usually, and think about my own life. What have I sown in the lives of my children or friends for good or bad that I now see as fruit? What weaknesses did they see in me that they now perpetuate in their own lives? Can they see in my life the right kind of fruit as I have matured as a person and as a Christian? Will that fruit come to full size? Will that fruit be weak, disease-ridden, or bug infested?

A few somber thoughts as I hoe the woe out of the garden.