Shalom in the Garden

I didn't realize until today, just how much confusion and sadness, I really want to "lock out" of the garden. As I see the end of days coming into place, in the midst of the confusion and fear, I must sound like a broken record. We need to begin a sustainable food supply. I'm not talking about hording canned goods, although a few canned goods on hand to share isn't a bad idea, but I'm talking about gardening. It has value far beyond just food.

A couple of years ago, I got a question from people who were just beginning to think about gardening and growing their own food and they wanted to know while they were making plans, where was the best place to store their seeds. That's the great thing about gardening! It doesn't take a great deal of planning. It takes some dirt, and it takes some work, prayerfully G-d supplies the sunshine and rain. So, in response to the question, I told these folks the best place to store seeds was the ground . . . Even if you're not ready to go "big time" yet, the "dividends" of one row of beans or a single tomato plant will yield food as well as multiple increase in seeds for next year.

With this idea of starting something, even if it's small, keep something very important in mind. We do reap what we sow. So we don't want to plant what we don't want to harvest, and that of course has been a valuable metaphor for years, but I have something to add, as these end of days unfold in our instant gratification society. Without sowing, there is no harvest. We have become so dependent upon cans on the shelves of the super-marts, many of our young people don't even know that groceries, well some groceries are actually grown in the soil.

Getting started is important and to begin with, the size of the plowed ground is not the point, however; the soil we sow into and the seed we sow is imperative to the harvest. It's truly time to take this truth literally as well as metaphorically. Just as GMO has proven that we can eat empty calories without nutritional value, we can also sow bountifully into poverty. We've been programmed to raise the wrong kind of green for too long. We may refer to money as green, but even economically it has no real value, and it certainly will not sustain our bodies. It's time to grow some real green, and that happens in the garden. To get your feet wet and your hands dirty, a.k.a. to begin with, the garden can be a window box, a flower pot, a bucket, or a small section of the back yard. If you have a place for a house plant, you have a place to raise something of nutritional value.

I want to take this time to share something I'm doing and I'll be honest, there is a degree of laziness involved in my latest endeavor, so be that as it may, I'll share what I'm learning. I do not like to dig potatoes and I'm not a huge fan of potatoes. I mean I like them, but if I had to choose between mashed potatoes & gravy or salad, I'd choose salad. If I had to choose between french fries and squash, I'd choose squash, and how often does anyone make home made french fries anymore, anyway? Yet, I digress . . . back to my plan.

I'll address the metaphor of sowing and reaping in next week's edition. This week, is the practical application of a literal space contained gardening option and you can grow something with it. Here's my way to have potatoes without digging them. I have a 5 gallon bucket with a few holes drilled in the bottom, filled with soil. I planted 4-5 potato eyes and covered them. Now, picture this, the potato eyes are about 2 inches beneath the rim of the bucket, so there is over a foot of soil beneath, which is where the potatoes will grow. I water it regularly and at the end of about 4 months, when the tops have died away, I simply empty the bucket and pick up the potatoes. I'm trying to figure out the timing, so I can just have a fresh bucket of potatoes every few weeks and rotate the growing cycle of each bucket. I tried this last year and there are more intense and complicated methods, of this potato bucket project, but this one worked well for me. Now all I have to do is time it so I have a bucket of potatoes ready every month.

This isn't exactly the most compact of patio gardening ideas, but half a dozen buckets rotating is a pretty nice crop of potatoes, and there is no digging! And, since the potatoes grow under the soil, you can raise chives, cilantro, dill, or many herbs in the bucket as well. There are many vining vegetables that will also grow in buckets on the patio. Just because you're not farming 40 acres, is no indication you can't grow something where you find yourself planted!