How Does My Garden Grow?

Whew, boy howdy, this is not as easy an assignment as it would appear.  Fishing_Guy, you must be joking, right?  I’m sure that Mac, Darla, Gail’s Man, can come up with wonderful concise but all encompassing pictures and quickly decide which shot says it all, but I’m supposed to put it all in one picture?  What makes my garden grow?  You mean besides the God in whom I move and breathe and have my being, as well as my garden?  Which would be the best picture,  the soil, the sun, the water, the nutrients, the humus additions, the temperature, the cutting and dead heading, the tying and staking, the fencing, the …?

But you see for all my squirming and fussing it really is easy.  I just had to think of one of the reasons God put gardening in my heart, so hard and fast, that I must do it, no matter where I am or what stage of life I’m in.  He put it in me to discipline me, to grow me.  Time is how my garden grows.  Time is nearly everything in gardening and farming and I am terrible at time, and my Creator knew that. 

I have a horrible concept of time, well maybe not horrible, but often terribly unrealistic and sometimes one might wonder if I’m even working from the same planet as everyone else.  Is there a planet that rotates slower?  Orbits the sun slower?  I’m clearly from there, oh wait, then there is my impatient side, when I come from the planet that spins much faster.  God certainly knew what he was doing for me when He made me want to farm and garden.

In just about every other pursuit I can imagine, whether a job or just a hobby, nothing is as wrapped up in the element of time as farming and gardening are.  Whether adding the whole plant by the zodiac calendar or not (which by the way, you may have noticed I have abandoned) timing is key.  Yes, other jobs have timelines and due dates.  But those are made up by someone, quite frankly, arbitrarily picked and therefore could be mercifully adjusted for the non-time focused person if that was the heart of the task master, or you could just fire their lazy or procrastinatin’ bottom.

But not gardening, or farming.  They both, ultimately, always come down to timing.  I always seem to be working with seasons and the calendar in mind, today’s date, what needs to be accomplished for next week or three weeks from now, or six or six months.  Or they should be in my mind and my hands should be attending to them. 

Planting times, harvest times, when to fertilize, when to spray for pest control, coordinate with so many things, the seasons and day length, as mentioned but then there are even other considerations, days to germinate – weed seeds as well as crop seeds – considered, insect population rise and falls, soil temperatures, ambient temperatures, wind seasons, water supplies – the days of too much and too little, all of these have their times and fluctuations that must be considered into the duties that make up gardening and farming.  The list could go on I’m sure. 

Then there is the concept of time as in how long a job like pruning, weeding, thinning seeding, dead heading, watering takes.  This is a killer for me.  I want to do a lot of things, everything quite frankly, but unfortunantly I have to remember that everything takes time.  And that I am no wealthier in time than anyone else.  We are all given the same amount of time, we all have sixty-second minutes, and sixteen hours of time to be awake, and seven days in a week and three-hundred sixty five days in each of our years. 

Even though I think I can move faster than the speed of light to get stuff done, I can only move as fast as the average human.   I can only carry so many things at once so I have to make a certain amount of trips to the garden.  I only have two hands and one body so I can’t really water and weed and plant and spread manure all at the same time.

Plinking one seed at a time in a cell takes more time than I think.  I am constantly pulled back to a reasonable view of how much time I need to do certain tasks in and around the farm and garden.  Oh wait, and Dirt would like to have a real dinner a few days a week and clean boxers to wear when he goes out to greet the coyotes with his gun.

And yet another aspect of time that I have a hard time with?  Waiting.  I plant the seeds and for some reason I want to see the flower tomorrow or eat the tomato later today, okay not that bad, but durn close I tell you. 

Things take time, gardens really take time, some flowers take over a year to bloom, some even longer, trees take time to produce fruit or shade or just that right structure in the scene I want to create. 

I have such a problem with patience, I’m an impatient procrastinator, doesn’t that beat all, do you see now why God needed to make me a farmer-gardener?  It sure wasn’t cuz I was built for it, it was built for me, to teach me, to humble me, to grow me.

I do believe Dear Reader, that:

When I work in the dirt,

Time is my friend and ally and my bitter foe. 

But it is what makes my garden grow. 

 

That however, is my take on my garden and me, others in the header challenge may take a whole different route, so go see what they have up today, sometime around one p.m. Pacific time (you figure the time math out for your time zone, my time synapses are going to take a rest now).  Then come back maybe tomorrow and check out my side bar to see who won what.

Golly, I was hoping that there was money or at least candy involved in all this, but it is just for fun and fun it is.  I seem to be keeping up on blogging a bit better since I joined in their shenanigans.  They were so generous (or foolish) to be willing to deal with the blogging handicapped like me. 

Thanks again you guys, but now I’m out to the garden to fetch back some time that I’ve managed to loose again somewhere,  what did I do with it?  Now just where did it go……