My Winter Garden

As the first whispers of autumn crisp the air, I'm beginning to bed down my garden for winter.

The tomato plants went first, much to the disappointment of the squirrels and chipmunks who've been the primary beneficiaries of the crop.  They were followed by the cantaloupes, which I overplanted this year.  Of the dozen-plus 'lopes that grew fat on those vines, we ate four, and gave away one.  The remainder fell prey to rot, sinking slowly into the soil like setting moons.  This being only my second year growing them, I'd neglected to raise the fruit off the ground.  That, and they simply came in too aggressively to harvest them all.  I'll have that in mind next year.

My attention then turned to my sunflower planting.  At the northeastern corner of my front yard, two-dozen-plus sunflowers rise in early summer, creating a towering thicket of greenery topped with a firework display of blossoms.  It gives pleasure to passersby and pollinators alike.  As the helianthus goes to seed, it draws small flocks of goldfinches, which twitter and flirt through the air like flecks of sunlight.  It's just so utterly lovely.  

But that loveliness doesn't last forever.  By early September, those flowers are drooping and dry, the leaves browning and withered.  It starts looking a little grim, a little "gone to seed," as one might say if one were to wrap that metaphor around itself.  

Yesterday, it was time to bring them all down.  Uprooting a flowerbed gets a little more technical when the flowers are nine feet tall, densely packed and interwoven with wild grape vines, grasses, and miscellaneous other flora.

As a suburban gardener, I'm not taking a John Deer DM50 disc mower to the thicket.  That'd make it a one second process, but as I approach it by hand, it takes a couple of hours.

Every part of those sunflowers has a use, so I take them down one by one with care.  

First, I cut away the vines and lower leaves with a hedge trimmer.  Those go into a pile that I mow into compost.  Then I top the flowers, checking each one for seeds that escaped the attention of the birds.  Heavily seeded flower heads I save, hang, and dry.  When they're ready, I'll gently massage the seeds for use either in next year's planting or to give to Mom, so she can feed the birds in winter.  The towering stalks I trim and set against the sunny front wall of the house to dry.  Once they're dried out, they make decent garden stakes, and even better kindling for the hearth.

Taking down those fading flowers is always bittersweet.  Another summer passed, another season gone.  When I step outside the next morning, there's a sense of emptiness in the yard, a notable absence of green and gold.  Like all things mortal, we note a summer garden's passing with an awareness of our own finitude.

But the stalks will burn hot in the hearth on cold nights, the composted leaves will feed the garden when the days grow long again, and the seeds have been gathered in.

When you tend to the needs of the season, and set your intention to seasons yet to come, there's no need for sorrow when the flowers fade.

  

Difficult Weeding

As my garden stirs to life in the burgeoning warmth of early summer, I find myself engaged in some difficult weeding.

Weeding is something I enjoy.  It's primal and satisfying, as I carefully root out plants that are encroaching on the growth I'm trying to encourage.  Grasses and chickweed, clover and creeping violets?  They're all welcome to the rest of my yard, which is a flower-speckled natural smorgasbord for pollinators.  But in the 272 square feet I've got set aside as raised beds, I've got other plans.

So I take the time to root about and remove all of the growth that doesn't match my intent for that space.  It's a constant effort, but well worth it for the health of my vegetables.

Where it gets peculiar?  Volunteers.  

As most of my soil now comes from the compost piles in my shaded back yard, the last few years I've noted an ever-growing number of desirable plants rising from my compost-amended beds.  The seeds that make their way into the compost bin have a tendency to want to grow.

The familiar forms of squash seedlings rise in the middle of a bed I've got set aside for okra.  The usually welcome leaves of young tomatoes spring up where butternuts and 'lopes are intended.  This year, I counted over thirty 'maters popping up their distinctively complex first leafings.  Thirty.  That's a whole lot of unanticipated offering.

In some places, I'll leave them.  Several of the Providential tomatoes are welcome to stay in my tomato plots.  Last year, when a cantaloupe unexpectedly presented itself, I just let it run, and man, it was delicious.  I look forward to planting the progeny of those 'lopes this year.  

But in most of my garden, they're just not part of the plan.

Here, my pastoral predilections come into conflict with my gardening awareness.  As a small church pastor, unexpected volunteer energies are as welcome as manna from heaven.  Where human beings of their own free will make the choice to serve and put in effort, it's a marker of something afoot that needs to be encouraged and enthusiastically supported.  Those blessings are a vital part of God's work in the world, and the primary pastoral task is to nurture, resource, and celebrate them.  

Sometimes, a gentle nudge of the pastoral crook is necessary to keep things on track, to assuage the mutual misunderstandings that we humans are so good at, or to keep limited energies from scattering.  But mostly, it's a question of not letting my ALL-SHALL-LOVE-ME-AND-DESPAIR ego-desire to be in control become a stumbling block to what the Holy Spirit is doing.  

It's remarkable how much of pastoring is simply not getting in the way. 

But an actual garden?  It needs a bit more focusing than the metaphorical garden of the faithful.  It only takes the form and shape we give it, as herbs and vegetables aren't capable of sharing our intent for their growth or placement, no matter how many planning meetings and visioning exercises we inflict on them.

Weeding must be done.

So, with muttered words of apology and promises to tend well to their kin, I'll dig fingers into the ground, and pluck tiny tomatoes and seedling squash from the living soil.  

Of Trauma and New Growth

I've been growing okra this year, mostly as an experiment to see how it fares in our ever warming Midatlantic climate.  

The answer, much to my surprise, was that it did fine, but underproduced at the height of our record-setting summer.  It's heat tolerant, yes, but once temperatures got up into the high nineties (that's mid-thirties for the rest of the world) growth and production slowed down.  That was compounded by a moderate drought, which stunted growth even more despite my best efforts at watering.  Nothing beats a good soaking rain, and that just wasn't forthcoming for much of the summer.

Yields were less than I expected, but still enough.  The usual territorial incursions of squirrels and chipmunks and wandering deer weren't present, which is often the case when you introduce a new and unfamiliar plant to the garden.  

I harvested and flash-froze dozens of pods for use in curries, where they have proved nutty and toothsome and utterly delicious.  Given that half of my family was from the South, I figured I'd also fry some up with cornmeal batter. 

The plants had great leaf growth, and as temperatures started to moderate a bit and the rains returned on a more regular basis, production ramped up.  Each okra blossomed with multiple flowers and growing pods, and it looked like I'd get that bumper crop I'd been hoping for...enough to start bringing some in to my churches' Little Free Produce Stand.

"Great," I thought to myself.  "This is working exactly according to plan."  Never think that.

Because that's right about when the deer hit.  

That's "deer," singular, or so my neighbor across the street told me.  Just one doe, unusually thin, that spent a good long while uprooting my early fall green bean plantings, and then dove voraciously into the okra.  The neighbor came over to shoo it away, but the deer seemed unphased.  It might, like a skeletal doe I encountered last year, have been suffering from wasting disease, which makes deer both listless, endlessly hungry, and utterly unafraid.

It was a massacre.  

Half of my plants had their flowers, all of their pods, and most of their leaves consumed.  That included my two most productive plants, which I'd hoped to use for seedsaving later in the season.  They were reduced to sad green twigs with short, mostly empty branches, only a few wan leaves hanging off here and there.  

I redoubled my application of anti-deer spray, which seemed to prevent another attack on the few okra that remained.

I turned my attention elsewhere in the garden.  I uprooted spent beans and tomatoes, amended the soil with homegrown compost, and got to replanting for the fall harvest.  

A few days later, I noticed that the ravaged okra was responding to trauma.  Not by withering, not by dying or surrendering to death, but by defiant regrowth.  

From the "elbows" between the main trunk and branches, the cells of the plant had repurposed themselves.  Fresh new leaves, delicate and hopeful, unfurling out of seemingly nothing, ready to catch the rays of the sun.  

From the abundant light of our G type main sequence star and a single minded vitality, the work of life would start again.

Gardens can be such heartening things.

Getting Ready for the Heat

The world is getting warmer.

There's not any question of it now, really.  I mean, sure, you can argue otherwise, but only if you never go outside.  It's not a question of whether global warming will occur, but of just how hot things are going to get.

The science is out on that particular question, although most of it points to things becoming more and more unpleasant as the years progress, with "unpleasant" meaning year after year of heat records inching up, and the equatorial regions becoming functionally uninhabitable.

Here on the Eastern seaboard of the United States, things are a little different.  Forests have made a comeback, despite all of our relentless sprawl and paving, which has helped blunt the heat in the region.  Still, it's going to get hotter.  Winters have become close to snow-free here in Virginia.  Summers have sprawled out, and grown more intense.

Which means, if we are to face this future, that we need to be thinking about ways to adapt and prepare.

That's been a consideration in my own household, as we've both reduced our consumption of fossil fuels and begun the process of preparing our house for hotter days.  We put a new roof on last year, and when we did so, we selected a lighter colored shingle.  Lighter colored shingles have a higher albedo, which means they reflect away more of the sun's energy.  It's a simple thing, but it reduces cooling demand.  Our house is nestled in the shelter of dozens of shade trees to the East, which means that by the hottest part of the day, it's in shade.  Our roof overhangs the side of our house by several feet, reducing solar load to the interior, and at 1300 finished square feet, it requires less energy to cool.

Out in the yard, I've made a shift in my garden this year, as for the first time I've planted okra. My mom being from the South and all, I'm entirely aware of the challenges of cooking okra just right, and the unpleasantness if you cook it wrong.  When I tell folks I'm growing okra, many recoil.  This is unfair, because if you fry it up just so, it's really quite delicious.  It's great batter-fried, sure, but also pan-fried with masala.  Note, again, that the key word here is "fried."  

Looking ahead to our inescapably warmer world, okra makes a whole lot of sense.  Abelmoschus esculentus is grown in tropical climes throughout the world, and is both robust, nutritious, and highly heat tolerant.   It's also purportedly quite easy to seedsave, meaning it should be a stalwart contributor to any home garden in our hotter world.  Should.  I've still not seen a crop, or saved seed, so I don't want to get ahead of myself.

It's only the fool who doesn't prepare for the most likely tomorrow, after all.

Stalk and Vine

At the far northeastern corner of my little suburban lot, the sunflowers are again rising.  I've been growing them for several years now, and they're a delight.  This year, my little three by eight patch is thick with their rising stalks and greenery, and being the vigorous plants they are, they stand nearly at shoulder height already.  

The flowers are coming.

As plants, my helianthus are a gift to the garden for many reasons.  They're wildly attractive to pollinators, who then grace the flowers of my beans and tomatoes.  Situated right by the sidewalk, their beneficent compound flowers are a clear pleasure to passers by and magic for children.  

Their seeds feed passing birds in late summer, and the occasional odd vagrant.  Even after feeding the birds in an Optimally Poppins sort of way, their abundant seed heads provide ample stock for the next years planting.  That, and their dried stalks become my garden stakes for the next year.

For all of their robustness, sunflowers have a weakness.  They are, in this era of rising winds, vulnerable to the roaring blast of downbursts and squall lines.  In my first few seasons growing them, I'd lose many to storms, to the point where I started supporting them with stakes and lines.  That helped, but it was a little fiddly.

This year, though, I'm doing something different.

From an old dogwood stump, wild grapevines started growing.  Their tendrils snake through the stalks, and in the way of most vines, can threaten to overwhelm the sunflowers.  Left unchecked, the tangle of sprawling, smothering wild grape would easily overwhelm the whole stand of sunflowers.  It'd become a mass of fruitless grape, the leaves intercepting the light, the tendrils strangling the sunflower leaves.  The sunflowers would struggle.

I thought about systematically tearing the vine out last year, as I have with sweet, murderous honeysuckle in the past.

But then the thought came to me:  I could use it.  Useless as it seems, fruitless as it is, it could be helpful.  With regular and strategic trimming, the wild grape becomes something different.  The vines I let grow, and I let them secure themselves to the stalks.

Then, once a week or so, I cut it back, to be sure it's not dominating the sunflowers.

With the wild grape acting as organic support lines, the sunflowers are more resistant to high winds.  The complex matrix of tendrils fasten the stalks one to another, strengthening the whole, and all of them become stabilized by the root system of the grape.  

With a little effort, attention, and some judicious trimming, even wild grapes can serve a good purpose.

There's some comfort in that.

Why I Will Mow In May

Spring has sprung, and that means that the ground cover in my front yard is suddenly growing again. Grasses and chickweed, bugleweed and clover and dandelions, a wild heteroculture suddenly surging upward in a riot of green and ten thousand tiny flowers. That means that it’s mowing season again. 

Some folks don’t like mowing, viewing it as an onerous and pointless chore. But I’ve always liked it. As a teen, I looked forward to mowing the yard, because it was utterly satisfying. Sure, it needs to happen pretty much every week, but it’s one of those things that you do that has a definite result. It’s not abstract, not uncertain. It’s not a Zoom to develop a plan to create a task force to consider writing an overture to the General Assembly, as much as that warms the Presbyterian heart.

You do it, and it’s done. Like a made bed, or a sink emptied of dishes, it's as satisfying as a contented sigh.  

There's been a pushback against mowing lately, one of those earnest "well-actually" Newthinks that pop and meme about in our addled collective subconscious.  

Mowing is bad.  Don't mow.  Don't mow for the whole month of May!  No Mow May!  Let the pollinators pollinate!  Let the grass grow, man!  Let your freak flag fly!  It's habitat, too, bro, cultivate habitat, for our little crawly friends.

Which it certainly is.  Ever take a long walk through a field of tall grass at the height of summer?  Though I grew up in the urban megaplexes of DC and London and Nairobi, I remember doing that.  One particular afternoon hangs in memory, a hike near the rural Virginia home of a family friend when I was thirteen.  I remember how alive that meadow was, the slow windblown eddies across the surface of it, how the waving grass leapt and whirred with hundreds of grasshoppers.   I remember the brightness of the sun, and how alive everything felt.  I remember the tickle of the grass against my arms, against my bare legs.  

And after we got back, I remember not just the tickle, but the ticks.  The dozen-plus ticks I found clambering on my legs, on my back, in my socks, in my shorts, and squirming their way with thirsty intent towards my tender regions.  Even thinking about that now makes me itchy.  

Tall grass is habitat, without question.

That said, I'm no fan of the synthetic, lifeless monoculture of the American suburban lawn.  It's false life, with all the uncanny valley wrongness of astroturf or a reanimated relative.  It's why my own lawn is speckled with flowers and variety, all of which is evidenced here on this page.  But if you don't mow, you and your children and your dogs and neighborhood chipmunks will suffer.

Because mowing is not merely aesthetic. It serves a purpose.  That purpose, for me, goes well beyond reducing bloodsucking parasite populations.  

I am a gardener.  In my yard, mowing serves my compost piles, which I rely on to hyper-locally produce the earth that fills my nearly 300 square feet of raised beds.  For them, mowing is absolutely vital.

Back in the Fall, every single leaf that fell from the thirty plus trees that shade my back yard went into a pile, because, well, it’s compost. Six months worth of coffee grounds and filters, every peeled carrot shaving and bit of onion skin for half a year, all of it has been blended into that giant pile of dead leaves. It’s easy to look at that brown mound in winter and see nothing. It seems inert, lifeless, just a lump of matter. Which it is, right up until the moment you feed it with mowed greens in the Spring.

Because mowing a lawn is an act of harvest.  It's profoundly and directly useful, and I look forward to it as I look forward to collecting up fallen leaves in November.

All those lush green May clippings are rich with nitrogen, which is a veritable feast for the millions of teensy tinesy little microbes that have been sitting patiently among the leaves in one of the five by eight fenced compost piles in my backyard. Dump a couple of bags of cut ground cover onto the pile, give it a good oxygenating pitchin’ with a pitchfork, and the little microbiome of that pile comes to life. It’s no longer a pile of cold leaves, but teeming with life and the promise of life.

I go out, and I turn it on a wet day, and the pile smells good.  Not of rot and death, but sweet and alive.  It's warm, too, radiating heat as the energies of hundreds of millions of organisms thrive in the cuttings from my efforts.  Steam rises from it, filled with the scent of rich organic earth being birthed.  

My mowing last May is feeding my growing beans and tomatoes, my squash and my potatoes.  It will fill my table this summer.  The excess will go to the Little Free Produce stand of my church, joining with the outputs of other gardeners to feed those who have need.  That cycle of life and generous intent repeats, year by year, tied to the ebb and flow of life and the seasons.

So I will mow this May.  It isn't a drab and dismal duty.  It isn't a mindless, pointless ritual serving the cold demands of a soulless suburban deity.  

It's participating in the joyous bounty of creation.

A Thicket of Spears

Three years ago, I put bare-root asparagus into a four by eight plot in my front yard.  

I've always enjoyed asparagus, and when my wife suggested one evening that she thought it'd be fun if we grew it, I needed little further encouragement.  While you can grow asparagus from seed, the best way to get it going is transplantable rootstock, and so that's what I ordered.  The little brown tangles arrived in the mail, looking...as bare root plants often do...like nothing more than yard detritus.  Into the ground they went, and the waiting began.

Lots of waiting.

Asparagus are sturdy, long-yielding perennial fernish critters, cousins of the lily, and a well-established plot can provide a few tasty weeks of early spring sweetness for decades.  But like so many good things, they require patience.  The roots need years to establish, and if you harvest the spears in the first couple of years, you'll cripple or kill the plants.

So I've been waiting, these last two years, gently weeding in spring and summer, cutting back the dead stems in fall.  In winter, I've tucked the roots under a blanket of leaf-mulch from my yard, and fed the soil with the wood-ash from my fireplace.  Those years have flew, as years are wont to do when one gets older.  This year, I sampled my first harvest.

When the first spears stabbed up through the mulch in early spring, I snapped them at their base, and munched on them right there in the garden.  They were, as all who advised me suggested, quite delicious.  

For three and a half weeks in early spring, we ate all of the produce of that modest little patch.  Every effort of those roots, devoured.  I could have pushed for a week more, but after returning from a short family trip to Texas, the spears had explosively regrown.  

After weeks of being cut back, every growth devoured, every effort stymied, the plants were stronger than I'd ever seen them.  Spears as thick as my thumb had shot up a foot in a matter of days, growth so vigorous and rapid that it felt like one could almost see it.  I'd been so concerned about weakening the plants in the years of their childhood and adolescence that I was surprised at their vitality.

Weeks of traumatizing and retraumatizing them had done nothing more than piss them off.  Their growth felt a little defiant, a little fierce, as living things so often can be when we face a challenge from a position of resilience. 

"Respect," I may have muttered to them, as I weeded around the phalanx of green.

It was time to back off, and let them grow.

Dad's Garden

When my family returned to the States from London back in 1982, my father planted a garden.  

A five-by-ten patch of grass on the southeastern side of our back yard was dug up, soil amendments added, and every year in the late spring, he'd set tomato seedlings into the earth.  Better Boys, generally speaking, because they were the perfect complement to BLTs and burgers.

Dad was a single generation removed from actual farming-stock, as my paternal grandfather grew up on several hundred acres of family farm in upstate New York.  Hops were the primary yield of the family farm just outside of the little village of Chuckery Corners, but there we Williams grew everything, as most Americans once did.  

Connecting with the soil was a thing for Dad.  Not as important as music and performance, but still something that gave a sense of heritage.  It was part of his story.

Every summer from middle school onward, the tomatoes at home were fresh picked.  Rows were set out on our screened-in porch to sun-redden to ripeness, safe from the depredations of deer and squirrels and the occasional enterprising turtle.

As the years progressed, the tomatoes kept coming.  Eventually, gardening got harder.  Dad's knees started to go.  Then his hip.  Then, bit by bit, his heart.  By the time he was in congestive heart failure, the garden was too much for him.  My brother and I pitched in to help keep it going, and as the CHF progressed, we managed to keep a few tomatoes coming.  Dad took pleasure knowing they were there, as my brother tended the plants during the summers he spent caring for my folks.

When Dad died early last fall after a hard season, the garden sat fallow. With spring coming on, Mom asked that I pull the fence I'd put in a few years back, and take up the pavers that once sat between rows of plants.

So this last week, I did.  The fence, gone.  The paving stones, dug from earth. 

What had been a garden is now returned to grass.

The pavers, I took for my own gardens. 

They took their place in my eight by eight raised beds, where they will provide stepping stones between tomatoes and garlic and greenbeans, between the garden that is present and the garden that has passed.

Collateral Beauty

I'd never planned on growing flowers.

Oh, I think flower gardens are a lovely way to spend one's time.  They add a little beauty to our world, and make for a wonderful visiting place for our beleaguered pollinators.  I can see the delight in that.

But that's not my goal, as I plant.  My garden, insofar as I put time into it, is all about the delight of producing even a fractional amount of our household food.  My enjoyment comes from the taste and flavor of those things that rise from the earth, from the beans and strawberries and blueberries, from the tomatoes and potatoes and squash.  That I am in some small way nourishing my body with those simple labors has a nourishing effect on my soul.

So I did not set out to have flowers, to have beauty for the sake of beauty, though I appreciate it.

But of course, I do have flowers.  You have to, if there is to be fruit.  There are so many.

I'd expected the little white strawberry flowers that dappled our patches, and the tiny, delicate ivory blossoms on the bush beans.  

I knew, in the back of my mind, that tomatoes came from little yellow caps, that dangle down from their vines like the headgear of some anime elf-maiden.

But I did not anticipate the lovely white and purple of the potatoes.  And newbie that I am, I had no idea that squash would be such a riot of immense, yellow-orange trumpets, male and female both.

So there's my garden, turned to the simple, unassuming labor of producing good things.  And in the midst of that labor, almost as an afterthought, it is filled with splashes of color and loveliness.

There are lives like that, too, human beings who are intent on giving and producing simple goodness.  And even though they aren't intentionally setting out to be beautiful, they are.

Teachable Beans

This weekend, the green beans started coming in.

I'd planted them two months ago, a humble batch of bush-beans in the patch of garden by my driveway.  It was the same place I'd put 'em in last year, and had decent luck with them.  I'd put in about thirty seeds last year, all from one of those little packs of Burpee seeds in the supermarket.  Of those thirty, twenty three had yielded.  Of those twenty, about a dozen were really, really productive.

I'd seed-saved from last year's crop, meaning this year there was no buying of seed at all.  Everything that went in sixty days ago had been grown in my garden the year before.  No packet from Burpee.  No ordering online.  These plants were the children of the plants that fed my family last year.

Or rather, they were the children of a select group of those plants.

Last year as the season wore on, I looked for the strongest and most vibrant plants in the garden, those dozen high-producers.  I watched as some of them came up, short and stunted and yielding only a couple of beans.  I watched as others arose, large and vibrant and thick with delicious dinners-in-the-making.

On each of the strong ones, I marked several beans with tape.  I didn't pick them, but let them grow to fullness, then brown up and harden into a seedpod.  I collected those seeds in a jar.  It only seemed fair, given those plant's efforts on our behalf, that I should look out for their kids.

This season, I put in forty plants, all from the seeds of last year's most vibrant plants.  I lost only two to marauding bunnies.  Almost all of them were as strong and vibrant as their parents, and the garden exploded with life.

"Wow, those are growing fast," my wife said, as we came back from the beach.  She was right.  The plants were noticeably stronger this year.

Friday, I picked about a pound and a half from the patch, and then picked another pound and a half Sunday afternoon after returning from church.  Fresh, organic, and delicious.  We've got plenty there, and plenty coming.

It's what human farmers have done for millennia.  We look to the strong and the productive, and we attend to those plants that are the most vibrant.  We look to the places of health and strength for the seeds for the next harvest.

Here, there's a lesson for faith.

Gardens can teach us how to tend our own souls, and where we put our energies in life.  So much of human life is poured into our weaknesses.  We carefully tend the places of pain, opening and reopening wounds.  We water and nurture the fever of our angers and resentments, and the harvest we yield is predictably stunted, year after year.

We should, instead, look to those times of grace, love, laughter, and forgiveness.  These are the places in us that we should tend, carefully.  We should carefully mark the seeds of those times, collect them, and plant them whenever the time is right.

Even the simplest of God's creatures has so much to teach us.

The Destroyers of Gardens

Last year at around this time, the little strawberry patch in front of our kitchen window was just starting to bloom up.  I'd put it in a year previous, and it had become a riot of plants.  I'd not mowed them under as some recommended, but instead let them rest under a thick blanket of insulating leaves as they overwintered.  

After I cleared the leaves and they got to berrying in early summer, the results were better than I'd expected.  More berries than we knew what to do with, so many that I found myself making jars of delicious homemade strawberry jam.  It was amazing, so amazing that I even found myself doing the church-metaphor thing.  

Wouldn't it be awesome if churches were as vigorous, sweet and simple as strawberry patches, I thought, and I wrote a little bit of whimsy to express that thought.

But then the varmints came.  

Not the chipmunks, who'd been there all along, sneaking berries, slipping like furry ninjas under the fencing.  Not the birds, who couldn't get in through the netting.  Not the ants, who'd take a few of the berries here and there.

The varmints were woodland voles.  Cute little beggars, they are, but they are death for a garden.  Voles don't go for the berries.  They're burrowing nibblers of all green and living things, and what they go after is the life of the plant itself.  They devour the whole thing, leaves and stems and all.  After they're done, the plant is dead, and they move on to the next one.  I noticed that some of the strawberries had been eaten down to the nub, out on the periphery of the patch.  Then more.  Then more still.  Within two weeks, they had burned across the patch like a fire.  

The patch was obliterated, and they moved on to the second patch I'd put in. I found their holes, and filled them in, but they returned.  I had a few traps, purchased to clear the winter-nesting mice out of our house, and I deployed them, but they caught nothing.  It was too late.

Our harvest was destroyed, two dozen everbearing plants reduced to stumps, like Oncelers set loose on a forest of Truffula trees.

This season, about a half-dozen survivors had struggled back to life in our primary strawberry patch.  To bring the patch back up to speed, I repopulated it with extra plants that I'd put in a couple of overly shaded planters in our back yard.  

Within a day, two had been devoured, an old vole burrow hole now freshly cleared right next to them.

They were back, and I was ready.  By the entrance of the hole, I lined up two small nonlethal mousetraps like two barrels of a shotgun.  They were sheltered under some bricks to feel "safe" for the voles.

Within a day, I'd caught one, which I took a half-mile down to a patch of woods and released.  It's a woodland creature, after all.  It is welcome to be there.  I reset the traps.  Overnight, I caught another, which had up and died in the nonlethal trap.  Panic?  A heart attack?  Starvation, perhaps, as that tiny little body consumed itself with its own hungers?  Hard to tell.  I dumped the tiny carcass in the back yard, cleared the trap of the stench of tiny death, and reset it.

And again, I found myself thinking metaphorically about church.  

This Wednesday, I go to a mandated Presbytery training, one that I've already been to twice before.  I know, ugh, you think, but this one is both necessary and valuable.

It's required for all Presbyterian pastors every three years, and its purpose is straightforward.  It refreshes us in our commitment to maintain a healthy care for the garden of our own bodies and souls, so that we won't fall prey to the soul-devouring hungers that lead to sexual malfeasance.  

If we are anxious, isolated and unbalanced, inattentive to our physical and spiritual disciplines, bad things happen.  We can yield to the temptation to cross boundaries, in ways that destroy our covenant commitments to loved ones and our communities.

It also reminds us to be attentive, to be watchful for the signs of the selfish devourers, the ones who would come into the garden and destroy the new life we are so carefully tending.

Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom

As a part-time pastor, I often have time on my hands.  Not enough that I feel aimless, but life doesn't shimmer daily with stress and busyness.  I write.  I study.  I read.  I meditate.  I take walks.

That means, of course, there's no excuse for the laundry going occasionally undone.  Not that it does.  Ahem.

As spring has come again, I've found myself spending more and more time outside away from the screens and boxes.  I've been out in the dirt of our modest suburban lot, digging and planting and watering.  Another strawberry patch has appeared, across the drive from the one that went in last year.  A few more blueberry bushes now grace the front of our house.  A little bit of yard has yielded to a tilled stretch of earth, in which green beans are slowly germinating.

My wife calls me "Farmer Dave," although on this scale, it's really just gardening.

What it is not is a chore.  Mowing the grass?  That's a chore.  I do mow, of course, but the yard itself is just a living carpet.  A messy living carpet, at that.

Our lawn is not a bland monoculture, not a perfectly manicured patch of organic astroturf.  I run our four-stroke mulching mower at the highest setting, so the grass grows thick and shaggy.  Oh, the boys and I can still toss a football and run about on it, but it stays long.  More blade means more surface area for photosynthesis, way I figure it, and that's good for both the plants and creation.

It's mostly green, but in the spring, it's dappled with the colors of the other plants that I'm totally content having as part of the yard.  As I push our rusty but trusty old Honda across the yard on its tiptoes, the flowers remain as it passes over.   There are the purples of violets, the purple and white of irises, the soft pink-white of clover.  Here and there, the yellows of buttercups.

With the coming of warmer weather, across them now dance pollinators, bumblebees and...joy of joys this year...honeybees.  The honeybees had been missing the past few years, but they are back now, at least for the moment.

And those bees also stop at the strawberries...and next year, at the apple trees I'm planning on putting in.

It reminds me, just a bit, of the importance of letting things be.  When our lawn is perfect and uniform and devoid of any life but the life we have decided we will permit to live there, it may appeal to our desire for control.  But when we inflict that desire on the world, we break connections that we didn't realize were important.  No flowers in our yard means less to feed and attract the pollinators.  Fewer pollinators means a weaker ecosystem.

The ecology of congregations is a bit like that.  If a faith community is just one thing, uniform and devoid of variety, we make ourselves vulnerable spiritually.  That reinforcement might be reassuring.  Nothing validates our sense of self like wrapping ourselves in a blanket of sameness.   But it means we are less likely to adapt to the world, and less able to stand in meaningful relationship to the stranger.

And that isn't a healthy way for us to be.