Harvesting Before the Frigid Temps

This week we pulled beets and carrots from our little gardens before the predicted below-freezing temperatures.

Our soil must have unbalanced PH because most of the beets and carrots were small despite growing for several months. They had lush tops but hardly any roots!

Last week I had picked a few zucchini, yellow squash, and even a few green beans. But this is about half of what we harvested from the garden with the Indian corn. Not much, I'm afraid.

We were thankful to get at least a few vegetables after all the work of collecting last year's seeds,

digging, tilling,

planting,

weeding,

transplanting (I transplanted a few tomato plants but left the rest in the greenhouse in big bins).

A few months ago we heard a good message about Jesus' parable about the Sower, the Seed and the Soil. 

1. "Good soil will produce good fruit," was the first point.

   The Holy Spirit enters our Bad Soil Heart and makes it soft.

2. "Good fruit takes time."

 It took probably six months before this tomato plant started to bear in our greenhouse. We had such cool weather earlier in the year and I had to just buy starts to transplant.

 

"It's fun to put others down because it makes us look and feel better about ourselves," said the speaker. "It's easy to make snap judgments about others--'They can't be Christians because they aren't doing or growing or looking like....'"

I mean, look at this awful looking tomato plant (although it is, to our embarrassment, producing almost as much fruit as the lush green ones). 

"Tares look just like wheat until the head appears," the speaker told us. But "tares are not fruitful."

Here are wild sunflowers taking over where the pepper and tomato and beets and carrots were planted.

 I also had to fight off aphids on especially one pepper plant in the greenhouse.

There were hundreds of aphids on just one of the leaves. I would spray the aphids off with water outside, and sprinkle diatomaceous earth on the dirt and leaves.

3. "Good results will vary," the speaker let us know.

 There doesn't seem to be much here. The one day I brought in one cherry tomato, one hot pepper, and a sprig of parsley.

The beets in this area of garden did not do well at all. They didn't have as much sunshine as other parts, and perhaps not as much water, either.

"The numbers are in God's hands," we were reminded.

It is God Who sends the sunshine and rain and creates the soil.

It is He Who controls everything from the weather to natural disasters to the way people work in their gardens--or don't work much!

Let's learn from Christ's story about the seeds and the sower and the soil.

Let's be patient with ourselves and with the other guy or gal.

Let's grow the best we can.

Let's weed out the bad attitudes, the distractions, and the snap judgments.

Let's focus on growing and bringing forth fruit--

as much fruit as God can produce through us earthen vessels!