I don’t know if I’ve ever seen something grow as fast as the pumpkin vines in our little square garden with a little fence around it in the corner of our back yard. They’ve taken over the garden having grown over our strawberry bush, green pepper plant, surrounding our sunflower. It’s been a little frustrating! Every day I have to go and redirect the vines from taking over the tomato bushes.
I think it’ll be nice in the fall to have some pumpkins but they’ve become a little out of hand, almost uncontrollable and a little bit of a nuisance because I had no idea this would happen!
And the reason we have the pumpkin vines like this is because back in the early winter, when we started decorating for Christmas, we used our then barren garden as a compost to help “fertilize” the soil and threw our fall pumpkins in our garden patch and left to rot all winter.
In the spring, my husband tilled the garden and I planted cucumbers, tomatoes, zucchini and green pepper. A few weeks later we saw three little spouts shoot out from the soil in our garden where I had not planted anything. It took me a while to figure out what was beginning to grow there. I finally recognized the leaves as they got larger and realized they were pumpkin leaves having remembered that’s the spot we left the pumpkin to rot.
Well, I do not have much of a green thumb when it comes to gardening…especially vegetables. For some reason I haven’t had much success with it. Maybe because it’s becoming more shady every year as the tree nearby grow taller. Maybe it’s the soil. Maybe because I don’t talk to the plants, encouraging them to grow. Maybe because I’ve just been a city girl all my life.
I’d love to have a green thumb though and have my kitchen filled with the fruits of my labor. How nice to have a blueberry bush in the backyard and be able to pull off a few ripe berries in the morning to put in our cereal. (We did plant one this year but it’s been a flop because some little wild creature eats the berries right before they’re ripe! I then heard we should go buy some special net to protect it…good grief!)
I’d love to be able to make a salad for dinner with all the vegetables from our garden. All the vegetables I planted in the spring produced one delicious first batch in the late spring but that was it! All our big tomatoes had a yucky fungus, the green peppers were taken over by the pumpkins and the zucchini and cucumbers sizzled up and died from many 99-104 degree dry days after that…EXCEPT the cherry tomatoes survived and I’m so thankful for that!
If there was anything I tended to the most were the cherry tomatoes. I tried to water them in the morning when there had not been rain the day before. Those tiny tomatoes are our children’s favorites. They will go in the backyard and pull them ripe off the vine and pop them in their mouths like candy.
But this pumpkin vine wants to take over those tomatoes, too. That vine smothers all the other things growing in the garden. It spreads like the wildfire out west. It’s weighed down the little wire gate surrounding the garden and is slithering like a snake away from the garden boundaries out into our yard.
However, I haven’t had to do a thing to help them grow. They’re almost like a weed! That vine has needed no help what-so-ever. I’ve purposely not watered them hoping a little bit of it would sizzle up from the heat and die leaving me just a few pretty ones in the corner of the garden…controlled.
I thought… guilt, fear, worry, frustrations swept under the rug and sin can grow rapidly like that pumpkin vine if I let the seed that I thought was thrown away and put to death sit in the soil in the darkness of my soul and secretly reproduce again. Then when exposed to the heat of matters, those sins sprout again and grow and can become out of control.
And many times they do.
I then have to try to re-direct and keep them in their “little white-picket fence” in my heart where I can tend to them there and not let others see them creeping and slithering out and exposing my self-filled sins for my world to see.
Instead I want to be like those tomato plants. They took their time growing from the time they were new sprouts and continued to grow little baby tomatoes that became beautiful, full size, ripe cherry red tomatoes to enjoy.
As the gardener, I’ve watered them. Pulled out the weeds around them. And maybe they heard me say, “Oh look! You’ve really grown! I’ve tended and cared for you and now you glisten pretty there in the sunshine. I’m excited I can use you…and enjoy you.”
Can you hear God say that about us, too? He takes delight in being our Gardener, nurturing and showering us with his grace and love so we can grow steady and strong to not only be able to survive storms but also bask in His Light as He enjoys us.
“Grow your good grace in me, O God. Make me receptive to the ways that you water and tend this garden of my heart. Prune me when I need pruning, nurture me where I need nurturing, weed me where I need weeding, and care for me tenderly when I need your tender care. I love you, O Gardener of my soul. In the tenderness of Jesus. Amen” (Jim Branch)
Thankful for…
#813 our cherry tomatoes
# 814 interest daughter had in voice over the phone telling me what she learned about screech owls
#815 sitting on the porch into the night with my laptop writing
#816 sound of crickets
#817 ugly beautiful…the pumpkins taking over the garden
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