Sunflower Faith

John 10:28

Except for the fact we can’t have a cow, pig or a  chicken, growing a garden has become a case of learning to become a little more self-sufficient, as well as an ongoing homeschool project that can be incorporated into many forms of lessons.

This spring, after the last frost, we plan on turning a good portion of our backyard into a garden and next week, I plan on starting seedlings from seeds in a min-greenhouse, I found at the local Wally-World Mart.

This works on a double benefit: We are starting a basic unit on plants so the kids get their science credit in there and on the other hand, when it comes time to start planting…we will have plants ready to go in the ground.

Until we start seeing fruit of our work, we have always cook,mostly from scratch, our meals, but lately as the economy has worsen and salmonella scares are constant, we began to realize we were relying too much on our grocery store and others for our food source.

There is something fulfilling about having food on our table that we know we’ve invested time and work into growing and  it doesn’t hurt to not only grow food that we know where the source is coming from in our backyards, but also as a way to help ease our grocery bills, by buying things we know for sure we can’t make or completely do without.

As we begun work, planning on our garden, it was not hard to begun to realize too, that having a garden, returning to a more simplier, self-sufficient way of life, cuts out a lot of the distractions that the modern world has to offer too and really helps us, have more focus on the blessings that our Heavenly Father has for us.

I came across a quote that put this in perspective for us:

Gardens, even the smallest one, can become windows to our inner life. Weeding and cultivating, planting and harvesting, celebrating successes and bemoaning failures can teach us more about ourselves than we might imagine. Garden images abound in the scriptures.- from Gardenening as Prayer

Aren’t we all plants in God’s hands? Fledging seedlings that struggle and grow and flourish and are prune by a wonderful Gardener who seeks to bring out the beauty and life in all of us?

Having a home garden helps bring that message home so much more to us and to our kids and it also helps us remember how important it is to be a part of the world but not in it.

As we carefully plan out our garden, we read on what to plant and what not to plant around other plants and how what is planted can harm or help the other plant beside it.

In our research, it became a study , inwardly as well, of how important it is, ourselves, of who we do and do not (and should not) have around us, that can make us grow stronger in our faith, or just weaken or hurt us in our growth.

There are people that can help us grow stronger in our walk with our Heavenly Father that we need to have around us, but there are those who for worse rather than better, are like weeds, that can choke our faith and keep us stumbling or in many cases, may attract other wrong influences in our lives.

From Wikibooks, I was floored by this wonderful analogy of how like God, tenderly tends to us, we, ourselves, must tenderly care for the garden that we called, our lives:

A “vine-grower” in any self-respecting vineyard must take very good care of the vine and its branches. Time, energy, and investment of will are factors that can be associated with any tender of vines.

I’m very excited about starting our garden; I”m excited about the prospect of sharing the fruit of our work with family and friends,but more than anything, I’m excited to returning to the roots of what our servitude to our Heavenly Father is, that it is by the fruit of our work by our own hands that we benefit from and not by depending on just others for our food.

With gardening, there is a serious pledge to do away with frozen vegetables for good and supplementing as little as possible with store bought food. We currently don’t do ready made meals and prefer to cook by scratch the majority of the time, but as we start our garden, we pray and hope to extend this to many other ways.

We are even looking at canning to extend the fruits of our harvest and yes, you’re getting an idea what next week’s WFW maybe, lol, but I’m also planning on starting to make our own bread versus buying store bought bread.

God Bless You Gentle Readers,

Twinkle Mom