Garden and Gratitude


I cleaned the garden today, getting it ready for winter. I’m hoping to get compost and more rock dust on it before Christmas. The freeze is coming soon now and most plants will succumb. If the freeze is hard and long, roots in pots may not survive. The garden and I both miss the longer days and the sun.

I transplanted lettuce into the tomato pots in the greenhouse, that’s the sign of an optimist I suppose. I just like to keep things alive, perhaps you do too. In gardens as in life there is the struggle to keep things going against the odds.

I’m often amazed how we as people don’t see opportunities that present themselves to us, later those opportunities may seem obvious, but at the time we can’t or won’t see them. A sage once said that everything we need to grow in awareness is always right there in front of us.  And, I’m always interested in why we do or do not see , sense, or feel them. Why our actions sometimes seem at odds with our best interests.

Get a PHD in Psychology and discover you don’t have all the answers. We humans are very complex. Often times we are afraid of making mistakes. We surely are going to along the way. But is anything ever without an opportunity? I’d say everything is an opportunity for wisdom and compassion. No matter what, it is better to act, to keep moving, experimenting than to sit paralyzed. A mistake still has momentum and will self correct, and from another point of view, may simply be an experience we really need.

When we are very young there are the terrible twos. I think of that time as a time when we children discover we are not free. We are being told no and we don’t like it. We become oppositional. To a greater degree this fades as we grow up, but not always. Sometimes it continues into adulthood unabated, but arising from the unconscious mind.

This season has been unusual, unusual because many people I know had great stress, and some great physical trauma. I am grateful for my health and I send hope for theirs.

Well, I’m happy, I had a nice garden this year. Something’s grew really well, others didn’t, it’s always like that. A garden is a lot of work. We have a great farmer’s market close to us. I do my best with my garden, not everything gets attended to at just the right moment. But there is more good than not from working in a garden, so I do what I can.

I just dug up the beets. I brought the surviving herb pots into the greenhouse space and now comes the winter.

This beet I am holding is about four pounds and last night we ate some of it and it was good. How we feed the plants though getting nutrition in the soil can yield very nutritious food.

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A tree trunk the size of a man grows from a blade as thin as a hair. A tower nine stories high is built from a small heap of earth.
Lao Tzu

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