A Gander Through the Garden in Autumn

Swimming in the Salmon Ladders, somewhere near Mt Rainier, Washington

With one last summer adventure playing in the salmon ladders in our nearby forest, uniforms purchased, and school supplies dropped off, our summer break has come to a close, our school and my little piano studio has begun! A heavy haze of smoke from distant wildfires are upon us. Its harvest time in our valley and those who work in the orchards and fields are in their busiest season. In our little garden boxes and flower beds, we too are harvesting our little crop. The strawberries have sent their tendrils out to every corner of the strawberry box; the raspberry box is filled with fresh green shoots and are continuing to produce delicious berries. I can just imagine the bounty next summer when I cut back the stems that produced fruit this year. I want to set it up slightly different next year to accommodate the entire box of stems that are standing up waving in the air with no guidance at the moment shouting to me, “I’m here! What do I do now?”. Among the surrounding area, the weeds are growing like crazy, so more work needs to be done there. 

We have a large pumpkin and some smaller ones, so that is satisfactory for this year. I don’t treat the apple tree with any kind of spray so the chickens have been enjoying all our worm eaten apples that already lay on the ground ready to be scooped up into the bucket and taken to the coop. As the apples begin their process of decay on the ground (and on the branches), the sweet apple scent drifts toward me as I walk past our tired, contented old tree. Maybe that’s like us in old age, will our lives smell their sweetest in our elderly years, Lord willing, filled with wisdom and good, helpful words to serve others?

My dahlia, with a fresh haircut from our Praying Mantis

My sunflower decided to blossom, and another one today! One of my dahlias bloomed. I’m still a novice at caring for dahlias. When it did blossom, I noticed it had gotten a haircut! The tips were gone. I’m thinking our praying mantis was the culprit. My hibiscus was packed too tightly in the container I had for it, and the poor blossoms just shriveled up and died each time they appeared. I transplanted it today into a larger area and gave it more healthy soil and water. Maybe we will still see some hibiscus blossoms this year. There was one I got to enjoy but only for a day before it gave up! There is so much to learn about different varieties of plants. The blueberries did fine. They are still getting established, but I’m happy with them. 

The lavender. 

Oh the lavender! She grew with bounty and gusto this summer! I couldn’t keep up with watering her so the flowers dried up to a crisp early. But nevermind! My youngest decided to make lavender tea! It was delicious! Tonight he harvested more of the lavender. As soon as I walked into the kitchen, I could smell the fragrance of relaxation. His plan is to plant a tea garden next summer in the new garden boxes. Fresh loose leaf tea with a dolop of honey, handed to me in a warm mug? Let’s do it!

Image from Unsplash

Lavender Tea Recipe

Cut a few sprigs of lavender and dry them by tieing a string around them and letting them dry out for a couple days, OR use a dehydrator OR use the oven at a low temperature for about an hour or two. Put the loose leaves into a tea strainer, a tea ball, or a tea infuser (basically all the same thing), and pour boiling water over them. Let the tea steep for 4 minutes and remove the leaves. Sweeten with sugar or honey! 

For Labor Day, we feasted on jalapenos. Of the four plants I bought, I thought there’d be a lot more. However, we will be content with what we were able to grow. We made jalapeno poppers as a Labor Day appetizer, and they were delicious. Below is our jalapeno popper recipe. Tomorrow, I head to the local orchard shop to pick up some fresh peaches. I hope you, too, are enjoying the fruits of your labor, and relishing in the beauty of the journey. 

Jalapeño Poppers Recipe

Supplies & Ingredients:

-vinyl gloves: these are very important when working with jalapenos. We’ve learned the hard way. You don’t want to get any of the seeds or juice of the jalapeno on your hands where you could transfer it to your eyes or other surfaces where it could be transferred to others!

-20 toothpicks

-20 jalapenos

-1 package of 20 slices of bacon

-1 container of whipped cream cheese

Preheat oven to 450.

Cut the jalapeno in half, and discard all the seeds. Do this for each jalapeno.

Lather the cream cheese into the cavity of one half of the jalapeno. Roll it up in a slice of bacon. Secure it with a toothpick and set it on the tray. Its ideal to have a wire rack on top of the cookie sheet/pan so the heat can evenly bake the poppers. Bake in the oven for about 25-30 minutes. 

Enjoy! They might be a little spicy, but much less so than in their raw state. I’ll post another garden update later this Fall when I’m ready to prune and put the garden to sleep for the winter. 

As for gardens of words… I leave with a quote from my summer reading:

“For such was unconsciously the attitude of each of them towards each new phase of each new day; it was not unimportant; it had some new discovery hidden within it for the finding. It was the attitude of the trained mind collecting the evidence; in their case for the Christian thesis that all things, somehow, work together for good. ”

— Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill

Everything Beautiful in its Time

I’m sitting on the patio off our kitchen as the sun rises in late August. My delightful lab drops the tennis ball taunting to me to play fetch. We will play, oh we will, many times throughout the day! First I need my coffee. I see Mt Adams in the distance with her snow-capped peak in the distance. We’ve had very few wildfires this summer in a place where wildfire smoke accompanies many summers. Its been refreshing. We have a few more days of summer break here in the Pacific Northwest before our kids go back to school. Rain has fallen several times the past week and has brought the heat of summer to a milder and more enjoyable temperature.

It has been a very northwest summer for our family! From Washington to Idaho for a youth camp, to Oregon to visit friends, to camping and hiking in northern California exploring the Redwood National Park, we have enjoyed the diversity of scenery. We even tried some boogie boarding in the ocean, the day after a tsunami warning which turned out to be a few added inches to the shallow waves where we were. At our campsite the night before, we decided to eat extra amounts of s’more bits and have a campfire read aloud because as my husband sang, “Its the end of the world as we know it!” In fact, there was word that the town near us was evacuating. One of our campsite neighbors had read that the Red Cross said you are safe if you’re at 150 ft above sea level, which we were at 160 ft! But as we fell asleep that night, I told the kids, half-joking, if water comes to our campsite, grab a tree and hold on!

Coming home is always a lot of work to get everything unloaded, washed and put away again, and to get the sand out of everyone’s belongings! We happily came home to a messy and torn up back yard. You wouldn’t naturally think that a yard dug up by an excavator would mean all is well, but it was, at long last.

Earlier this year, I was walking out in the back of our yard just to check on things. There was a spot in our septic tank drain field that was slowly flooding and we were putting off fixing it because its a large property and there is so many other things to maintain. As I walked around to the small flooded area, I noticed it was spreading and getting larger, and the black gooey substance on top of the grass looked increasingly toxic. We found out that our entire septic tank had failed. So we worked on preparing a plan to connect to the city sewer.

Before we left for our vacation time, the excavator began digging to lay the new pipe work, and completely smash up the old, concrete septic tank which was probably over 50 years old. After laying the pipes, he backfilled the area where he dug. Because he had to work in this area, we turned off the irrigation to that part of the grass and risked the health of our little cedar privacy border, and the grass understandably turned yellow. Bricks from the outdoor patio were removed so he could connect the pipes, and large rocks were unearthed in the process. Its a messy yard. You wouldn’t think that we’d be happy about such a beat up section of yard, but looking at it, we don’t focus on the mess, we know its fixed, and we see the potential for beauty.

Isn’t that how it is with God? When He comes in to excavate our hearts, there is a lot of demolition work to be done. He smashes idols… out of mercy. He tears up the old ways… out of mercy. He gives us a new heart to replace the broken unusable one that has been flooding our lives with sewage, and completely cleanses us. All mercy. Rocks appear out of nowhere and are scattered across the yard. A person saved by God’s grace is someone who is being excavated, or to put it in Biblical terms, sanctified. That process is often messy on the outside as God’s grace works in that person’s heart and then flows out to other areas of his or her life. Sanctification is a lifelong process, and slowly the beauty of God’s grace emerges and others can see what God has done from the inside.

When I looked at our yard after we got back from vacation, it was a beautiful mess! Beautiful because I know that deep underground, the problem was fixed. The old had gone and the new had come. But what to do about this mess? As I stared for many long minutes at a time, a plan came together in my mind. We would take all the bricks out of the ground and create a garden space… of course. So that is what we have been working on in early mornings before it gets too hot. We removed and stacked the patio bricks, then I laid down weed fabric, a brick border, and bark mulch where we will set 4 raised garden beds next summer. My project is still in the works. I’m only half way there, but its looking beautiful.

There’s no wind today, and the sun is up. I think I will finish this project soon. There will be more work to do like hand-picking all the large stones, setting the sprinkler in the large swaths of yellow grass, trying to save the little cedars from withering up in the heat. And then maintenance. But I see beauty.

Isn’t that also how God sees us? His salvation rescues us from sin and brokenness. His work is complete in our hearts even if we don’t see it. What does He see? He sees beauty. He sees what is to come, and He promises to do that work in our hearts and lives. He does the work, and gives the vision, and then sets out to complete what He has started in us.

“And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion at the day of Jesus Christ.”

— Philippians 1:6 ESV Bible

Do you see a difficult relationship in your life? Do you have before you an uncertain future or broken ways of thinking that result from fear? We all have brokenness in our lives that our Lord is working on. The heart problem has been solved, our sin has been covered by Christ’s blood if you have faith in Christ. The new pipes have been connected, buried in the soil of your heart. The excavation has been accomplished, and now the Gardener gets to create beauty from that. Imagine the gardens that God envisions in your life! Ask Him for that! He will create a place of beauty out of all that has been torn apart. I’ve seen it happen in my own life, over and over again. But more importantly, its what God says in His Word.

“He has delivered us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.”

— Colossians 1:13-14 ESV Bible

Questions to ponder:

1. Have you responded in faith to the call of God in Christ Jesus to surrender your life to Him and accept His offer of free grace?

2. What areas of your life need excavating? Why not ask Him to show you those areas? A long time ago, I pictured in my mind the house of my heart. And I asked the Lord to go through the rooms of my heart and show me where change needs to happen. He will show you!

3. The answers to your deepest heart questions won’t come from a person, or reading a devotional, or a book, though those things can be wonderful. The answers to your deepest needs come from knowing God in His Word, and His Word is where your heart needs to dwell. Find a Bible reading schedule to keep yourself immersed in His Word, and begin today!

In my garden, I imagine dahlias and lavender nestled into the corners of my raised beds, attracting the pollinators to do their mighty work. I imagine a wooden garden bench to sit down on and watch the sunset on summer evenings. I imagine our little struggling cherry tree, finally thriving and providing shade, green grass, and butterflies. I imagine the beautiful work of the Faithful Gardener who makes all things beautiful in His time.

“He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also, he has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.”

— Ecclesiastes 3:11 ESV

In The Old Orchard: Putting In The Seed

A pot of oregano and my seasonal candle choice for late spring, early summer, Garden Herbs. I love to have seasonal scents for my family to enjoy.

The sun rises early now. I awake with daylight pouring between the wooden slats of our window blinds. My dog lays on the ground by my side of the bed and waits patiently for me to sit up. I walk quietly past my kids rooms. With school days over for a few months, the diligent and busy early mornings are now quiet and still as teenagers sleep in just a while longer. My chocolate lab, Charlie Joy Buttercup, shakes her body and the clinking of her dog tag is the only noise in the house. I let her outside onto the kitchen patio and start the espresso machine. I light my candle, gather my books and pens, and reaching for the softest blanket, I set my steaming hot black coffee on the side table and continue in my Bible reading plan. I just finished Leviticus. Its beautiful, its mysterious, its strange to the modern man or woman, and yet it feeds me somehow. I don’t claim to understand every passage. But the more I read it, the more I need to read it. 

Marilla, Henrietta, Poppy & Daisy

I like to see my chickens in their coop from my chair and watch from afar through our bear den windows. There is one apple tree on our property, perhaps leftover from an old orchard of another time and era as most of the properties around us were at one time orchards. I pruned some branches the other day as I couldn’t quite see as much of the coop as I wanted. I was startled to find many little green apples forming on the branches! Most eventually will fall to the ground from the weight, then we throw those to the chickens. But many are salvageable for apple sauce and pies. 

I close my Bible and put on my shoes. Its time to check out what Marilla, Henrietta, Poppy, and Daisy are up to. Charlie-girl comes with me, most of the time. As soon as I come round the side of the house, the hens often see me and run to their chicken gate. I dodge the sprinklers that are still on, and say good morning to my little ladies. I check their food and water levels, collect the eggs, check the perimeter to make sure no small animals are digging holes to get into the chicken run. I place rocks to block the holes that have been dug. Then I grab some grass or their favorite weeds and throw them in the run. I sing the Doxology as they “eye” me with curiosity, and off I go to water the garden. 

Last year, I dug up a square section of grass about 8 feet by 10 feet, and created a blueberry patch with a couple of old barrel planters I had found on the property five years ago. My goal is to establish blueberry bushes for my future grandchildren to enjoy when they come to visit! We can gather the blueberries together for a sweet treat and then read the picture book, Blueberries for Sal. 

My lavender bush is mighty this year! It is such a glorious bush! I also planted a hibiscus plant and a hellebore plant from a friend. My fairy garden is thriving with Lamb’s Ear seeds from a friend at church, prairie lilies which are a must-have for anywhere I live, a very meaningful plant to me. Chrysanthemum and a dahlia also adorn my fairy garden. Florence, our tooth fairy, has now retired from her duties and sits silently pensive among the flowers towering above her. 

Onto the garden boxes where a strawberry patch is in full swing with tendrils extending to multiply its delicious sweet goodness! One day, it will be a thriving box of only strawberries, but until then there is space, so this year I have paired the berries with jalapenos, onions, and marigolds. Raspberries are in another box, and though it will one day be solely a raspberry box, again, it still has room, so in go the tomato plants from a friend at church, volunteer mint is returning, and again some onion seeds to fill up the space. Lord willing, it will be crowded with food later this summer. I can’t wait to share a photo here of the abundant garden I’m envisioning. I’ve also planted cucumber, pumpkin, winter squash, dahlias, climatis, and of course, sunflowers. 

On Sunday, the heat of summer arrived as we were also hosting an evangelism class and meal together for our church. There was no wind this time, so we set out the picnic table, the canopy, the chairs, all under the shade of the apple tree. The shadow lengthened giving relief from the sun, and we gathered with members of our church to discuss the very important work of welcoming others into our church community, to share with them the most important message of all, and to grow in our ability to share well our hope in Christ. 

Though we have only one apple tree, and though I’m still trying to figure out how to care for it each year, it has its own stories and memories throughout its lifetime. How old is it, I wonder? How many birds and cats and children have come to seek shelter or a hide-and-seek place to play in its branches? How many piñatas have we strung up for birthday parties in the past 5 years? How many pies have been made? Who are the families who have worked hard to prune it, harvest from it, and find shade on hot summer days?

To leave you, I will offer a bit of inspiration, a garden poem by Edward J. O’Brien:

“The Whisper of the Earth
by Edward J. O’Brien

In the misty hollow, shyly greening branches
Soften to the south wind, bending to the rain.
From the moistened earthland flutter little whispers,
Breathing hidden beauty, innocent of stain.
Little Plucking fingers tremble through the grasses,
Little silent voices sigh the dawn of spring,
Little burning earth-flames break the awful stillness,
Little crying wind-sounds come before the King.
Powers, dominations urge the budding of the crocus,
Cherubim are singing in the moist cool stone,
Seraphim are calling through the channels of the lily,
God has heard the earth-cry and journeys to His throne.”

— Favorite Poems for the Garden