Garden Blog 2/26/13

Today is Tuesday. When I got up in the morning the lawn was green, not frosty white, and when the sun started rising in the sky, I knew today was the day to begin working my plan, my hands and my fingers. Nothing too serious, just cleaning up along the east wall of the house. That's all I had time for. But it felt good to free some plants from winter debris, getting some of that Japanese clover out, dig around some of the perennials, and trimming the corner shrub. I'm planning on working the south side of the house and perhaps even section 2a, because the spurge is about ready to do some serious growing and there is quite a bit trimming back and digging out to do.  Juergen said the Garden Club is looking for some starts to sell, so - we'll see! Today was a good start! 

The Most Important Puzzle Piece

Through most of my life I've wondered what real love is? Though at times hottly disputed, the answer is still surprisingly simple and at the same time deeper than I can ever fathom:

"The Lord appeared from of old to me saying Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore, with loving-kindness have I drawn you and continue my faithfulness to you." Jer. 31:3 AMP
An "everlasting love" - a love so deep and wide and high that it does not only include yesterday, today, and tomorrow, but ALL my yesterdays, ALL my todays, ALL my tomorrows because HE knew me before I became aware of Him, and He faithfully draws me with HIS loving-kindness all the days of my life and will continue to love me throughout eternity because that is His character.
Here is how I personalize it: You God, my Creator and Redeemer love me with your everlasting love; you do NOT HAVE love, you ARE love. You draw me with loving-kindness because you ARE loving-kindness. You have loved me before I was born, and you continue your faithfulness to me throughout all eternity because you ARE faithfulness.
Dear Lord, I pray that I may become increasingly aware of your love, your loving-kindness, and your faithfulness in my life and be responsive to your drawing! Amen!

Garden blog 2/20

Nope! Still too cold in the morning, both, yesterday and today. Instead, I dehydrated some apples and bananas! Yum! Onion bread turned out soso; I think I want to make it a little less thick AND I need to score it before drying:). The zucchini crackers turned out well; again, I need to score it before it is too crisp. Also, I probably could make four recipes of the Onion bread to fill the dehydrator. Or two of each. I wonder if I could make a sweet bread cracker for Juergen to eat with yoghurt. Checking it out - thanks to the ease of using the internet!

Garden Post 2/18

Ha! So much for early morning gardening desire! It was way too cold! Of course, it probably also had to do with the fact that I went to bed after midnight and woke up with a hangover! I get hangovers from going to bed to late.  But I put a batch each of Onion Bread and Zucchini crackers in the dehydrator and baked a batch of Tuna treats for Trixie! It might be the first and last batch - it scented up the whole house with fish smell. Unbearable!!! Mixed with the smell of the onions - I wanted to go stay the night in a motel! I woke up sick to my stomach, groggy, foggy, barely able to shuffle to the coffee machine.  In fact, I went straight for the Exedrine - ah, good old Exedrine, it finally helped break through the fog:)! I did get a few other things done before leaving for the office and am grateful for the accomplishments of the rest of the day. Perhaps there warmer sunshine will fuel my gardening desire tomorrow!

Food for the Soul

Today is the 17th of February. The sun is shining; it seemed warm but the wind took the temp down a notch or two. My early white crocus have been blooming for the last week and today I spotted a yellow one. Ahh yes, food for the soul.  There is nothing like garden therapy. It's exercise for the body and eventually yields food for it too. But more than that - the dialogue between digger and soil, planter and plants, weeder and weeds is food for the soul and inexhaustible. It reaches back into past, grounds me in the present, stretches into the future, and for me always references the Creator.  The lessons repeat until learned, but the landscape changes from year to year - never a boring moment! This year, I'd like to keep track of lessons learned and gems gleaned during the gardening year via my garden blog. Secretly I hope it will help me become more disciplined and bless me with the joy of writing, something I've wanted to do for so many years.  Who knows where it might lead:).
The first thing, now that the crocus have announced the birthing of Spring, is to get organized.  It's something I think should really just flow from one year into the other but somehow that just never happens.  So in my mind, I can be very organized and disciplined but how to manifest it still eludes me.  Praise the Lord, He is granting me another day, perhaps even a full Spring, with Summer and Fall to follow!? All the more reason to see if I can hold on to it through writing about it.
I like to divide my garden into six sections and work in each section once every week.  In that way, I hope to keep up with tending to planting, weeding, and maintaining.  Hope is the operative word.  In a perfect world, I'd set it up and then it would just work exactly that way.  In my imperfect world, it at least gives me a certain structure that helps me keep on hoping to do better this week and the most amazing thing is that my flowers have never said that they'd withhold their blooming until I'm done with the weeding.  In fact, they sometimes help with covering up some of the weeds although that is not as helpful as one might think and most of the time the weeds will triumph eventually if not kept in check.
So when I think of the divisions this year, I think of the section around the east and south side of the house to the deck as #1, including the strip with the bushes and the roses, and also along the driveway (watering sections 1 and 2?); the middle section from the big gate to the back where the Korean Fir stands sentinel #2a, #2b, and #2c (watering section 3?); the south section along the fence from the big gate to the hill where the pine is #3 (watering section 4?); the back of the house #4; the hill; and the garden section.  The watering sections 5 and 6 of the first watering timer and the sections on the second watering timer will change because of the changes Juergen is making to the lines.
Juergen is taking the cement blocks of the raised beds apart and will use them to replace the wooden block barrier in the back of the hill.  Though he meant well, they did not work out as well as he had thought.  I'm glad we're redoing the area, it's still a plan in progress.
This blog is today's contribution to the garden; getting organized so I can start working the plan tomorrow.  By the end of this week, I hope to have done the following:

• raked out the vegetable area that Juergen rototilled (Mon)
• cleaned out winter debris along the east side of the house (Tue)
• weeded alongside the driveway (Wed)
• Thursday is a non-gardening day because of my work schedule
• weeded out winter debris section #2a (Fri)

Wow! Here goes my week as regards my garden - I'll keep remembering that it is my therapy! I'm planning to work no longer than 2 hours at a time, more or less:).

Yippety, Skippety! My heart sings!

Feedback for the Groundhog from Clarkston, WA

You said that spring would be early this year and you know what? I think you're right! My early crocus are blooming, tulips and daffodils are sticking their leaves up three inches and signs of spring are everywhere!Yesterday was a warm sunny day and my husband rototilled a bed for lettuce, kale, beets and perhaps cabbage and broccoli.  Tomorrow, I think I will sow lettuce and kale and see what will happen.  Today, we had a bright sunny morning but by afternoon the wind kicked up and it looked as if it would be raining.  No such luck though - unfortunately.  My friend Kris who lives up in Grangemont said she still has a lot of snow on the ground and my sister, Maya, in Switzerland said yesterday that they are still deep in winter.  Now THAT does not surprise me - it's Switzerland! But I'm glad we're in the waking up stage! Waking up to spring. That reminds me of waking up to the springtime of God's love in my life, in your life. Are we waking up? Are we asleep? How can we tell? I want to contemplate that in another post.

You are never alone

Alone. I came home today from the memorial service for a friend and found a note from my husband, saying that he had gone up the river and would be "home by dark." I felt alone.

I sat down with a cup of hot tea and asked myself what about being alone right now feels so different. Most of the time I don't mind being alone, in fact I often crave time by myself after being with other people. Much of my work involves being with others, actively listening to painful experiences of their life. Wether at the office or at home, being alone allows me to relax and refresh my energies. 

So when I listened to my question 'what about being alone right now feels so different?' I became aware of the heartache. It was not the being alone, it was the painful awareness that I'd never interact with my friend again in this life. I'd not seen her for awhile.  After we graduated from Grad school, we went back to our respective homes which were hundreds of miles apart. We had discussed some ideas about working together but each of us became busy in our spheres of influence.  When I heard from her about five years later, it became clear that though we had the same degree, her passion was to work with troubled families, mine to work with individuals. She asked me for a letter of recommendation for a position with WA State Children and Family Services which I gladly wrote and shortly after that she moved here. Still later, she opened her own agency to help troubled families and then contracted with Nez Perce County Court Services.  Both of us were busy with out work and families but every so often our paths would cross professionally. I think my last conversation with her was a few weeks ago over the phone, a professional referral. But I loved her and I think she loved me.

I loved her spunkiness, she was funny, full of life; tough she'd experienced a lot of heartache in her life, both in her family of origin and her own family and personal life. That's were her passion to help families came from. And help she did - the number of people attending her funeral and their stories testified to that. Professionals from the courts and individual families and friends shared how she encouraged and mentored and modeled love and kindness. I too shared how her kindness had touched my life when just before graduation I had an accident and she took me into her little studio appartment and cared for me for several days. 

And now I realize once more that I'm in the process of converting a living relationship into a memory relationship. It's what I teach some of my clients who have difficulties with letting go of loved ones who've died. That aching, longing, painful feeling is from going through that change. I'll not fight it, for fighting it leads to more pain.  I'll surrender to the process once more. Having gone through it before, it's not entirely unfamiliar. And as I surrender I become aware, I'm not alone, I'm in the presence of our Creator, Redeemer, and Restorer, Jesus Christ the Life Giver, our Lord and our God. We're never alone.