Gardening takes some faith....

if ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you.  (Matthew 12:20)

Okay, these are beet seeds, but you get the idea.  Maybe mustard seeds are even smaller.  I don't know, I haven't grown mustard yet.

Nevertheless, it takes a tremendous amount of faith to grow a garden.  It takes a tremendous amount of faith to plant a mustard seed and believe that it will grow to be a large tree upon which birds will alight and sing among its branches.  Although, as I understand it, a mustard tree is actually an enormous bush.  Oh well, the birds would look lovely singing among the yellow buds, too.

This season I tried to grow most everything from seed.  I sowed cabbage, broccoli, watercress, beets, spinach, various lettuces, bok choy, onions, garlic, carrots, and fava beans as well as ome flowers including Chinese lanterns.  But, this is risky.  there is no guarantee that I will be rewarded for my faith in these seeds.  For instance, while my cabbage seeds appear to be going gangbusters, my celery simply won't cooperate.

Some days I don't have a lot of confidence in myself - and as gardening is my newest attempt to grow as a human being, I'm particularly uncertain in this arena.  For instance, I don't know which kind of onions I planted: long day or short day.  I don't even know what kind of day I live in.  Some days seem REALLY long, but I'm not sure that the onions would feel the same way.  I don't know if I amended my soil correctly with the "green manure", otherwise known as white clover.  Even though I turned it back into the dirt, it seems to be growing where my carrots are supposed to be starting to pop their little green tops up now.

Not unlike the seeds I planted, I know that without a nutrient rich environment, the correct amount of light, and some companion plants, I won't flourish.  I know I'm not of the cactus variety - able to grow with the least of it - little water, little food, and no companions within my needled reach.

Or maybe I'm more like the broccoli seeds I potted carefully over a month ago.  I lamented to my "Squeeze" that these seeds had not popped their little heads through after a week.  He told me to have some patience.  And after much worrying, I read the package and realized that there was nothing wrong with them other than they had a long germination period of 5-17 days.  Right, so me and the broccoli seeds have that going for us.  I seem to be long germinating, too.  And every time I get close to being ready to greet the world as a fully formed broccoli plant, I mean human, I seem to have a set back and have to start all over again.  Just like my broccoli seeds when I left them to their own devices during a business trip.  They died from a lack of water and it's now round two on the windowsill.  Maybe the seeds don't have a lot of faith in me.

So, on I go each day with faith that is just about as small as a mustard seed.  Eh, maybe even smaller like the celery seeds that won't come up.  But, the promise (at least of the garden) is that it will be all I need if I'm patient enough, attentive enough, and loving enough.