I’ve wanted to garden for years, but haven’t been smart enough to seek out a teacher to help me learn how to do it, and all my efforts in the past have been just… yeah. It’s never worked.
Last Saturday someone in the ward (our local church congregation) hosted a workshop on gardening. He’s an absolute expert in all things planty, and it was just amazing to get to listen and learn from him, and be able to walk around his property and see what it looks like when you do all the things.
But it got better.
When I mentioned that I’m excited about gardening but that we’re basically a couple city kids with zero experience, he offered to come up and check out our place to give us pointers. True to his word, today he came up to our house and walked the property with us, looked it all over with his lifetime of experience, and let us know what he would and wouldn’t do.
I am speechless with gratitude.
I would likely have tried to continue gardening where the previous owner put their fenced-in garden, in spite of how poorly things went there last year. None of the plants did all that well. We yielded maybe a handful of tomatoes and like 2 zucchini. I chalked it up to my being in preggy-land and good for barely anything other than growing this cute little person.
Turns out, it just doesn’t get enough sun where that garden is. We could grow shade plants like lettuce and broccoli, but most garden-y plants aren’t going to thrive no matter what you do.
He had great ideas about where to put things, and it’s just such a relief to know where to put in effort and where not to.
There’s probably a good analogy for life in this story. The difference it makes to plan your life with God, the Master Gardener, vs just going with whatever happens to be there. Seeking out and creating the right conditions in order to get the results you want. How to work with the environment and how to change it. When to cut things down and when to plant them. Looking at the long-term.
But mostly I’m just thankful for people who spend serious time and effort to become an expert at something, and then are generous with sharing their knowledge.
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