Category Archives: Family

“Inch by inch, row by row; gonna make this garden grow. All it takes is a rake and hoe and piece of fertile ground.”
Those are the opening lyrics to David Mallet’s folks song often performed by John Denver. They’ve been in my mind and heart this summer as I have been giving effort toward tending a new garden plot.

Gardening is part of my therapy – my mental health therapy. When I’m in the garden, planting seeds, pulling weeds, tending plants or picking produce; my mind is not occupied with outside worries. For some reason working in the soil and watching the wonder of plants grow, blocks out all the other stuff. I think I inherited this behavior from my dad. He used to tend a large garden, spending hours in the summer evenings cultivating produce that blessed our dinner table. Now, as I look back, I wonder what kinds of things he was working out during his gardening therapy?

This season I’ve been breaking in a new garden plot – or is it breaking me in? We moved in the late winter and I converted some of the new home’s landscaping area into my flower and vegetable garden. It’s worked out pretty well. Early spring lettuce and spinach have been followed by bush beans, carrots, green peppers, summer squash, a variety of tomatoes, pole beans, and an abundant crop of butternut squash. The Covid-19 pandemic made it difficult to procure all the seeds I had hoped to sow in the spring, but I’ve enjoyed tending what’s come up.

I have also enjoyed having a new gardening buddy, our grandson Oliver. He is my produce picker. At 2 1/2 he has great enthusiasm for picking a tomato and digging a carrot. It’s fun to see the growing season through his eyes. I’m hoping we’re planting the seeds of new generation of gardener in this young lad. He does like to water the garden, so maybe that’s a start!

Granted my generational effort at gardening is less industrious than was that of my parents. For them, a big garden was a means of helping feed a family of five children. All of the canning and freezing of vegetables was a lot of work. In our household it’s really just a pick it and eat it endeavor. In that respect we enjoy most of the produce in the moment, while holding on to what will keep (without much effort on our part) for later. Any extra the garden produces is given away – which is fun as well.

“Inch by inch, row by row. Someone bless these seeds I sow. Someone warm them from below.”
This prayer reminds me that gardening, for me, is not only practical work and mental health therapy; it is spiritual practice. My image of God is often that of a gardener, working in the midst of our lives, cultivating, pruning, training, producing, and harvesting. God invites us to grow and asks that we yield to a Gardener’s best practices when it comes to bearing fruit.

Maybe this is why the garden is for me such a natural place of prayer. Life began in a garden and I believe will begin again in a garden. God has never left the garden of Creation, but waits in eager expectation for the sons and daughters of creation to come into their own.

The work of discipleship is the tedious, enjoyable, cultivating work of tending – cultivating – training – pruning – producing – bearing and harvesting. Time to get back to the garden . . . . .