Doing What I Can...

                                                        

     I am tempted to say that I am an inconsistent blogger, but I guess I am actually pretty consistent. I consistently blog only about once a year! That's probably a good thing for those who may read my occasional ramblings.

     Lately I have had a jumble of thoughts that all link together in my mind and I hope I can pen them coherently. It has to do with why I am an "accidental gardener" and not a methodical one, and why we have 9 kids and not 3, or 5, and why we are starting a coffee importing business in our 60's!
So what exactly is the link between all these different elements of my life? Ironically enough, it is the motto of our start up business, "Doing what we can..". I didn't even make the connection all at once, but recently I have been noticing a theme in my life. There are things that are important to me, very important in fact, that I cannot accomplish on my own or do not have an expectation of ever fully accomplishing, but I can't "not" do something. So.... I do what I can.

     Gardening seems to always reflect who I am in a way that is almost creepy. I believe that we all can benefit from growing something, and the more the better. Flowers and other ornamentals just give pleasure and a sense of peace to our lives. Home grown fruits and vegetables are tastier and more nutritious than mass produced store bought varieties. Not to mention that it's downright exciting to see them grow, harvest and eat them! If I am such a proponent of gardening, then why am I so haphazard, or "accidental" about it? Because my time and resources are often demanded elsewhere, and gardening doesn't get moved up on the priority list. But I do what I can... because I value it, and I find that little by little my garden grows and improves and gives back more to me and those around me.

What does that have to do with 9 kids, or coffee for that matter?

     I believe that children are a blessing, always and without exception. I believe that, because God says that. The culture and times that we live in make it very hard to believe that. I believe that God created families to be the ship that weathers the storms of life, but so many lives are shipwrecked by the storms and left with barely scrap of a lifeboat. I can't fix that, and may not even be able to convince folks to work on the boat before the storm hits. But, I do what I can... by investing my life into my family and allowing God to build it according to His design. Hopefully, as our family grows and expands, it will be a visible example and beacon of hope to others in a stormy sea of troubles and despair

And what about the coffee, you ask?

     Poverty is another one of those problems we can't seem to fix. Poverty contributes to one of the greatest evils in our world, human trafficking and slavery. Coffee is grown in some of the poorest regions of the world and is a profitable commodity worldwide. The challenge is allowing the profits to trickle down to the farmers and their communities. When this happens, economic opportunity grows in the coffee regions allowing families and communities to develop sustainable means of providing for themselves and thereby minimizing the opportunities for human traffickers to take advantage of vulnerable women and children.
I don't expect One Ounce Coffee to eliminate human trafficking in Kenya, or even in one small area of coffee production. Again, we do what we can... by giving farmers a fair price for their coffee, and  helping them develop their farms to produce more and higher quality coffee so that their future continues to improve.

As long as I live, I hope I can always do what I can.

Transplanting Weeds and Other Important Tasks

I have been thinking blog thoughts lately as I work around in my garden. I can get pretty philosophical as I bake in the Florida sun. Today I was debating whether to put some thoughts together, and Facebook brought up a memory of a previous blog post, so I am taking it as a sign! Actually, I laughed when I looked at my posts and saw that I only post once a year or more, so I'm due.
Recently I have been transplanting a certain lawn weed to create a low growing ground cover in front of my rock edged flower bed in the front of the house. The plant is in the portulaca family and it grows low and has sweet little magenta flowers. So one man's weed is another man's cheap ground cover. That's the thing about weeds, they are weeds because we didn't plant them and/or don't want them growing where they decide to grow. But is it still a weed if we find a purpose for it and plant it where we want it? Now it's something useful, maybe even valuable to us, but it's still the same plant, right? Dollar weed is perhaps the most hated lawn weed in Florida, but if someone discovered that it could cure cancer, you bet folks would be tearing up their St Augustine sod to grow some dollar weed!
There have been circumstances in my life lately that I would consider weeds in the garden of my life. I didn't plant them and don't particularly like where they are growing. They seem to be choking out things that I would prefer to have flourishing. I suspect that in God's plan, I may discover a purpose for them that will add value and usefulness that I cannot see right now. Even the yard weeds that I don't find worthy of transplanting have come to have a purpose as I uproot them and add them to the compost pile to feed the plants that I have deemed worthy of cultivation.
So, as I ponder weeds and unwanted circumstances I am reminded that it's all a matter of perspective. Will I wear myself out fighting to extinguish the weeds, or will I find some useful purpose for them and allow them to contribute to the garden of my life in whatever way they were intended to?

Faith, Obedience, and Grace

Well it sure has been a long time since I sat down to write. Lots of ideas have filtered through the brain, but by the time life gives me a moment.....well...you know how it goes. Those ideas are either lost, or seem really irrelevant. Currently, I am trying to decide if I can still organize the ideas I have had lately, or if they are even relevant.

I have been thinking about faith and obedience lately. Specifically about setting your mind and heart to do something that you believe God wants you to do, even if it appears that there is no way to accomplish it. We, Joe and I, have had lots of opportunities to over the years to see God work out seemingly impossible circumstances when we did set our hearts and minds to pursue what seemed like either unreachable God inspired dreams, or obey what we believed were God prompted directions. There are too many examples to describe, but what I can say is that if we had been unwilling or too unbelieving to step out in faith, we would probably would have spent our last 35 years raising a much smaller family in Pennsylvania.

Sometimes obedience is exciting and adventurous, and sometimes it is full of the mundane and can feel like tether when your desires are pulling you in another direction. Its those times that I know I have to trust that God knows better and is at work to refine those desires and even perhaps fulfill them in His timing and not mine. The challenge is always to be willing to act when He opens the door, but not to go prying open doors that He hasn't opened yet.The older I get, the more practiced I am at waiting, but still am amazed at my own impatience. 

There is always a period of incubation when an idea or desire or prompt is growing, but all the pieces just don't seem to fit together yet. In my garden I have so many things beginning to grow as the spring days unfold. Some will grow quickly, bud, flower, and bear fruit all in one season. The instant gratification plants. Others will take a year to put down good roots and get well established before rewarding me with some beautiful flower or good food. Still others, the trees that will bear abundant fruit for many many years will grow ever so slowly and become deeply rooted and strong to bear all the bounty they are intended to produce. God has so many ways of teaching us if we are willing to observe all that He has created. In the end, just as the sun and the rain are so necessary for growth in a garden, its His grace that gives us patience and that produces good results in our lives.

Old Garden....New Garden

I had to laugh when I read my little "about me" and saw that I said I thought I now had the time to think and maybe write a bit. What was I thinking? As you can see by the date on my last post, that is definitely not true. I have been thinking alot lately. I have actually been composing posts in my head, but now that I am actually taking the time to pen the thoughts, I am finding them all running together.

One thought that keeps popping up a odd times is something my son, Andrew, said in his graduation speech. He made a comparison between my style of mothering and my style of caring for orchids. I have been pondering just how many parallels there are with gardening and parenting and life in general.

We recently moved from a home that we had lived in for almost 15 years, and I had been planting the whole time. My gardening style really does reflect who I am. If I saw something pretty or was given a plant, I found a spot for it. It never occurred to me to plan or design my space. I guess nine children implies a certain absence of planning too! We just made room for them!

A full to the brim garden takes a whole bunch of tending and some occasional pruning to keep it from choking itself to death. As long as I kept up with it, all was well. Then there were the busy seasons when I didn't get to tend the garden and the weeds would creep in and the garden plants would start to get out of control and start crowding each other. Every parent knows those times when all of a sudden you look and say "how did this happen?" When life starts rolling over you like rough waves at the beach, so many things can get put off or neglected until some unexpected behavior or rotten attitude makes you stop and realize its time to start pulling overgrown weeds and trimming back the overgrowth. Then with lots of hard work and a full dose of God's grace, the beauty starts to return.

Leaving behind my old home with years of planting, pruning, and nurturing and starting over in a big, wide open, pretty barren yard has been quite a mix of emotions. On one hand, I miss the comfort of my old garden, but at the same time I am excited about the adventure of my new one. This new yard is totally different from the old one; as different as the season of my life is now from the one I was in while I lived in my old home. Most of my children are grown and building their own lives now, and all of the weeding, nurturing, and pruning has produced a wonderful harvest. Sometimes I miss the comfort of being busy raising my family and identifying with other busy moms.

Now I am beginning the slow patient work of preparing the soil and planting my new garden in a new season of life. I find myself being just a little too impatient at times and have to remind myself that the preparation of the soil is the most important part of the process, even if it is the most invisible.
I don't know for sure all that will be planted in my new garden, in my new season. But I do know that it will flourish or fail according to how much attention I give it.

Cooking with Manna

Once upon a time I decided that someday I would write a book and title it "Cooking with Manna, or Being Content with God's Provision". Funny how things work out. I think the provision I need to be content with right now is the fact that I can occasionally squeak out a few minutes to write a blog post with that title. I have two favorite guiding scriptures which loosely paraphrased say "give me just what I need, no more, no less; and I have learned to be content with whatever my circumstances are." If I can stay within those two concepts, all is well and I am able to enjoy the simplest things in life. My ideas, hopes, desires are often bigger than my current reality, but when I consider that my current reality is in God's hands, I find amazing little and big surprises to make life joyful.

Two recent occurrences have illustrated this to me. I have big, (enormous, really) dreams about planting gardens all around my new yard. The reality so far has been burying kitchen scraps and spreading a huge pile of free mulch in scattered bed areas. I have been able to plant some plants here and there as friends have given them to me and time has allowed, but for the most part, this year is slow preparation for the future. That's where a little divine serendipity and manna come in. When my little compost volunteers come up, I let them grow and harvest them and I am thankful for whatever they produce. My first harvest was a nice medium sized pumpkin, which I proceeded to cook, sample, and eat some of it as a side dish. That still left quite a bit of pumpkin to use up, so I made a batch of pumpkin muffins and brought some over to our new neighbors. That turned out to be a nice way to introduce ourselves to some really nice folks. So maybe my garden is not exactly what I want, but it was just what I needed at the time.

My second little bit of manna was a small piece of furniture in my next door neighbor's trash! My big ideas, and hopes of becoming a furniture refinishing hobbyist are a little beyond my reach at the moment, but this little nightstand was a bit sized introduction to the process.  I was able to use some paint that I already had on hand, and I found a great blog with all the info I needed to get started. I also met a wonderful lady at our local Lowe's who is a wealth of knowledge on "how to" and "how to much cheaper than you may think" I really don't have the time or money to go whole hog on the projects I would like to do, but now at least I know I can accomplish a piece at a time. 

I find that the more I relax and let God bring me the "manna" for the day, the more content I am with the outcome. I love my crazy "I wonder what that is?" garden, and I am really kinda proud of my first little chalk paint project. They are both fun, and they fit into my current reality quite nicely.

         No its not a grave

         Yesterday was my birthday, so I decided to spoil myself and leave the housework undone and go play in my garden. I’ve been reading quite a bit lately on “permaculture” and a thing called “hugelkultur”, which are basically gardening methods that once you get them going, tend to take care of themselves. So, I set out to start making my big barren yard a minimum maintenance oasis!

         
        As I was attempting to build a new bed using some of the ideas from hugelkultur when I realized that calling my blog “Practicing Serendipity” was hilariously serendipitous! It completely describes who I am. I garden the same way I cook, which is basically the way I attack all areas of my life! I read, study, observe lots of good ideas and methods in all sorts of things, and then when I attempt to implement them, it’s a sort of haphazard, half equipped process that in the end is left to chance to determine the end result. Most of the time it works out well enough, sometimes really well and sometimes…well not so much.

        
      To be painfully honest, I am a careless person. My earliest memories include feeling guilty about my inability, or unwillingness to just follow through with details and do a job well. Somehow I got by with a decent measure of success, but I know I frustrated a lot of people! So what does this have to do with my garden, or that shallow grave looking thing outside my bathroom window? Everything, of course.

       Hugelkultur is a method of gardening that builds beds over the top of dead wood, even whole tree trunks. The result is a bed that is both being fed by decomposing material, and watered by the amazing amount of water that the wood holds underground. This seems like a great method for my high dry sand hill of a yard. Then there is lasagna gardening, which relies on layers of compostable material to effortlessly maintain your growing plants which also sounds good to me. So, in my true haphazard manor, I combined a bit of this, and a bit of that and some of my own ideas and created the bed you see here. And I guess the rest is up to God! (by the way, I don’t actually believe in chance)

                 Practicing Serendipity

                              or the Accidental Gardener

     My daughter, Keri Lee is always telling me I should blog. She’s says that I am the original “crunchy mama”, from long before it was trendy. Most recently she has enjoyed my “accidental” garden stories of my compost volunteers that are now bearing fruit. She told me she was going to think up a good name for a blog like Serendipitous Gardener, so that got me thinking.

     "Practicing Serendipity" is an oxymoron and oxymorons are fun. Life is full of them, and I think God planned it that way. Some of our greatest joy comes from serious pain. Think childbirth. Some serious pain comes from our greatest joys. Think teenagers. And some of the most rewarding gardening decides to pop up from the compost!

     I have had considerable difficulty learning how to garden in Central Florida. So far my best efforts to grow edibles have failed, but I have enjoyed amazing papayas that sprouted from a friend’s compost heap, pineapples that grew on barely cared for tops placed in the dirt and this year some pretty decent tomatoes that showed up out of nowhere!

     Consequently, I have adopted a whole new gardening philosophy. I am gradually attempting to enrich my barren sandy yard with kitchen scraps and other compostable goodies. I have a rough plan of what I will plant here or there, but if something pops up and it’s not in my way at the moment, I let it grow and see what develops.

     Yes, I do know it’s a stupid way to garden, and you never know what will come of the seed of some hybrid veggie, but it leaves room for serendipity. It has also given me much food for thought and so far a little food for the table, so I am enjoying it. Besides, if nothing special grows on my serendipitous plants, they are still pretty and they eventually add to my compost pile! Nothing is valueless. That is my philosophical gardening thought for the day!