Say, God, We Need To Talk About This Garden.

About 1% of the haul

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Minnesotans obsess about the end of Winter. It’s not yet upon us in this moment, but our survival mechanism has kicked in and we’re already planning for Spring. It’s the only way you get through 5-6 months of freezing weather, icy sidewalks, frozen skin, and a lack of sunlight. Part of that obsession, in my case, is planning a garden.

Last year I had accumulated a bunch of gift cards for Amazon. I used them to buy seeds. Lots of seeds. (And Cliff bars…) I thought about how to lay out the garden, where it would go, and how to tend it. It filled many a frozen hour.

Come Spring, I had a couple of yards of garden soil trucked in, spread it on a vacant lot next to my house (the city didn’t seem to care if it was mowed or shoveled, I figured they wouldn’t object to a garden) and it was close to my garden hose. We had some warm days in April and I put in the seeds very early.

Now, months later, I’m on the second planting. I have harvested corn, watermelons, beets, zucchini, onions, and dill. Soon I will harvest sweet potatoes and the last of the zucchini. Most of all, I have harvested about a forty pounds of carrots, carefully shredded and stored to make carrot cake for the homeless meals.

God, can you explain to me why you let me do this? I have so much food that I’m dehydrating, freezing, and giving away at a furious pace. I haul zucchini in my backpack to the food shelf nearby. I have enough shredded carrots to make carrot cake for 150 and will soon have zucchini in an equal amount to make zucchini cake and muffins for a second gigantic Good Neighbor Meal.

I also have jars of vegetable chips I made in the dehydrator. Oh, how I love that wonderful machine from Cabelas. (Its making dehydrated cinnamon apple strips right now.)

Did I mention Rhubarb? Yeah, I have about 100 times as much of that as I can use as well.

Is this a message? Yes – I am blessed. I am able to kill off my stress and grow great things to eat. Not much better than a carrot fresh from the earth.

But next year, God, can you at least send someone to help with the weeding?

 

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