The Big Garden

Since I briefly introduced the newest gardening adventure this week, its time to show the tranformation. (and frankly, this has been consuming my life lately and my cooking/posting has suffered but we are almost done with the worst time consuming part --I'm deluding myself right now, work with me.)

As you read in the previous post this piece of our property was part of our horse pasture and has recieved quite a lot of manure over the past several years along with a lot of trampling so we have fertile hard packed dirt (and a lot of crab grass).

Since I do not have my beautiful horses to stare at anymore, I wanted to try and go larger scale on my gardening efforts so I could can more and feed more people (elderly neighbors etc.). So with the help of my parents and the loan of my neighbor's (Uncle Bill) tractor we begin the process of turning this fallow filed into a thriving garden again (the way I remember it from my childhood).

Here are the beginning stages to what we call "The BIG Garden": plowing the field to break it up-letting it freeze to kill grass roots. Will bring you more pictures soon (as they are still on the camera and we are finishing the planting today!).

My Dad (isn't he the cutest thing?)


Cutting the field:


Freezing the cut field: (thank you weather for cooperating!)

Food and Faith Challenge: Week 2

I'm going to go about the Call to Action a little bit different this week.

•Walk slowly and mindfully through a piece of land that’s important to you.

I'm going to start with a picture. This is part of my land:


I walk through my land on a daily basis to watch things grow. Everyday I walk through my gardens to monitor my plants, pinch a leaf, water here, pull a weed there. This land is important to me. It's been in my family for decades and multiple generations. It has been split, inherited, sold, parceled etc to a form unrecognizable to the original piece but I still have part of it. Most of my neighbors are still family. And this land still grows food for us and noursishes my soul.

The portion you are seeing used to be a fantastic garden when I was a child, feeding several families. Then it was converted to horse pasture for a decade, which is how I used it when we first moved in. We sold our horses last fall for several reasons and this year, we are turning it back into a large garden. I've watched it go from a garden, to green pasture, to snow covered, to barren land and now to rows of seeds and plantings that will soon be food. It's an amazing process and quite frankly more than I can deal with but I'm doing it anyway.

I'm connected to this land in so many ways and I will continue to watch it change and grow and do my best to work with it as much as possible. I don't have a tractor so I had to borrow this one that you see from family to return it to a garden as 3/4 acre is a bit much to do by hand but all the tending? It will be by hand. And I will raise my children here and teach them to watch things grow.

Walk out on a piece of property, even if its a townhome patio and find the simple beauty in nature.

And this? This is good NC red clay with horse manure.

Tornado Update

For those of you who heard about the recent tornado touch downs in High Point, NC (it made national news), I would like to give a personal update. The path of the tornado was about 1/2 mile from my house. If you had stood on my front porch you could have watched it the whole time. How scary is that?

A lovely Category (F) 3 that left a path of destruction over 200 yards wide for a couple miles. Trees, homes, powerlines, day car, vehicles etc. destroyed. So far I have not heard of anyone missing or dead and that is a wonderful thing. Homes that i drive by are leveled or split in half. It's very sad and when I drive by and see the utter devastation, it makes my heart drop to my feet to realize how close it came.

I am blessed with caring friends and family and as I sat huddled in my closet with my three dogs and cat curled around me (because like their mother they are big fat wusses too), my friend Beth and sister T were texting me where the storms were and how bad.

We lost our power at approx. 7pm Sunday evening when the first cell came through. Last night as I was trying to get the decrepid old generator going to try and save my freezer foods and scoop water out of my pool to flush my toilets (I'm on a well=no power, no water), our power came back on. I actually did a dance in my driveway and shouted "I have powerrrrrrrrr" (think He-man cartoon). I'm a dork, I know.

Our roof is missing more shingles, my privacy fence around the pool bit the dust, and my garden flooded. We'll turn the first two in on HO insurance and pray they come through for us as the roof has taken a lot of hits. We'll see how the garden does in the next two weeks. Hopefully my small seedlings will come back out and my seeds won't rot.

All in all, I'm very fortunate and I think its always a good reminder to take a moment and count your blessings and not just when Mr. Tornado passes you by. So today, take a moment to appreciate the good things in your life and tell those around you how much they mean to you.

Pink is the New Fall color

I woke up to a foggy Thanksgiving morning. The air was crisp and cold, the world was silent and still. It was one of those rare mornings that creeps into your soul like the fingers of fog grasping at your ankles.

And there it was. In my front yard, like a burning bush of hope to the Isrealites. My Fall camilla, blooming like it has never bloomed before. A ray of pink, in a silent foggy sinful world.

A gift, a promise, a beacon of hope.