I got this email from my sister-in-law right after my last post and I thought it was beautiful and she said it would be okay if I shared it with you. Maybe we'll all get inspire to plant stuff and take pictures this year! Hope so because there's something about gardening that makes me feel like I will have come into my own. Kinda like the feeling people get when they don't like coffee but feel like they need to keep trying it because it's the adult thing to do! Anyways, back to her email...
If people don't have time or space for a veggie garden, a CSA share (or share a share with someone else) is a great idea. It supports a local, organic farmer, it exposes you (and your children) to varieties of food which may not even be at farmer's markets, and it provides tips and recipes for how to use that produce. Often, you can also participate in events at the farm with your children, showing them where their food comes from.
You can find out about CSAs in Minnesota (many deliver all over the Twin Cities, at co-ops, and at farmer's markets) at this web site:
Other web sites which focus on practical gardening projects, particularly for moms to involve their kids in:
I have been studying why gardening is transforming me: it reminds me of how God works, of the acceptance required in parenting and of the repeated letting go we have to do throughout our lives. We can have faith and we can plant and water the seeds and we can nurture them, but we cannot make them grow or live beyond their natural life cycle. Their beauty is here for a time and is in more than just their flowers and we just have to accept that.
"There is a constant process of renewal that is always visible among plants, which means that when you're a gardener, there's always hope. The magnificent thing about a garden is that it is never, ever the same from one hour to the next. The light, the wind, the angle of the plants' leaves, the energy levels--they're always changing."
"Everything grows and changes in a garden. Try to hold onto a beautiful blossom and it changes, almost as you're watching it. Create the perfect design and it achieves its own perfection that wasn't what you had in mind, or the seeds you planted never come up, or they come up in different places than where you sowed them."
"It's always a comfort to see the plants come back every year. It's an affirmation that I, too, can get through anything. There's a reassurance that if the plants can hang on, I can hang on too."
"Anything that lives where it would seem that nothing could live, enduring extremes of hot and cold, sunlight and storm, parching aridity and sudden cloudbursts, any such creature; beast, bird, or flower, testifies to the grandeur and heroism inherent in all forms of life. Including the human. Even in us."
Enjoy!
Rachel
Oh, the quotes are from one of the books I have been reading:
Tending the Earth, Mending the Spirit: The Healing Gifts of Gardening (Paperback)
by Connie Goldman (Author), Richard Mahler (Author)
www.noemiphotography.com