Snow Covered Garden

Snow falls softly. The white feathery blanket hushes the sounds of traffic on the highway and it descends so quietly we don't notice until we look out the window. Booted feet make new tracks as my children head out to clear the small pond before the the weight accumulates too much and makes the chore take longer.

I peruse through Johnny's Selected Seeds and order seeds for cut flowers. I know the colours of yarrow and hollyhocks and lilies I already have are tending toward the antique shades and want to keep going that way to achieve a luscious warm flower bouquet on my dining table.

Then I order vegetables. New heirloom varieties to try and the old names that are like well known friends to me. Visión corn for my farmer. Cinderella pumpkins for my fairy tale princess. Cherokee purple tomatoes for me. Dark red cosmos for my butterfly. I add in a nitrogen fixing cover crop that my small farmer can help keep mowed between the garden rows. I shall try to start bode peppers once more in February and hope they bear spicy fruit for blending into garlic in fall.

Gardening begins in January with the bright colours of seed catalogues and a dream. Let the snow blanket the earth and cover up last years cover crop, the garlic bulbs, the fall-seeded onion and carrots rows, the mix of volunteer poppies and sunflowers. Let snow cushion the roots of strawberries , asparagus, and raspberries as they rest these winter months. Let the snow fall thick upon the earth and store up water and nitrogen for the soil. I shall store up ideas for cover crops and compost beds and greenhouse gazebos for bode peppers to bask in.

In spring, reality will hit. We will be busy with tagging and weighing calves and getting mama cows out on clean fields. Keeping laundry clean and sourdough baked. The school year end will come with a daughter that's graduating who already knows exactly what sort of dress she wants to create for graduation day. I will be rushed as I drop potato slips and pea seeds into the cool earth and my dream of a cover crop between all the rows will hardly feel possible because of the time it takes to scratch all the seed in.

But these are the dreaming days in January and we dream. We dream grand and plan long and it becomes the tiniest start for what we build. The end will not come out exactly as planned but surely the projects will be better because there was a dream in January. Like the Farmer likes to say with a laugh at his own imperfection, "If you fail to plan, you plan to fail."

Oh, we shall fail in our pursuit of perfection. We shall fail gloriously and miserably. In our failing we shall learn what went wrong and what went right. And we shall build upon failure to achieve success. It is better to dream and fail than to not dream at all. It is better to fail than to sit without a dream in snow blanketed January. Better to fail with wilted plants than to have a garden grow up in weeds or worse yet, stay bare, due to lack of action.

So I order the bode seeds and I order the talinum limon. Last year I got less than 25 percent success out of these seeds. I asked some expert growers questions and did some research about the origin of each plant. The experts told me they struggled with these seeds too. I sort of know how to try again with my new knowledge from them.

I don't know what this seed starting education profits me except more purpose in living throughout the dark winter months. Pursuing good dreams is our challenge at creating a better world. Failure is just a reminder this isn't the world we were created for. Jesus reminded us to, "Learn of me for I am meek and lowly in heart." Surely this joy in learning about His creation and this soil and its growing challenges is part of what He placed me here to do. Surely the failures keep my heart soft and curious to learn more.

I feel if I notice something beautiful and have an interest or a passion in it, that is the talent I am given. If I fear failure or imperfection and do not educate myself, learn from others and practice my passions, that is the equivalent of being given my talent and burying it. My interest might be pure and shiny clean, perfect in its dream state, but if it does not get used up by being shared, handed out and invested in, it does not grow and rejuvenate. I hand my interests to God and He keeps handing them back to me and I keep dreaming and working. I keep failing and learning.

January's seed catalogues are usually dog-eared and well-read by the time spring planting happens. I stack them all together in a basket that moves easily to a stool by the warm woodstove and I peruse the glossy pages that reflect the light on dark winter evenings. Sometimes I stack them on my studio table and practice painting florals.

In the winter i sit to dream and in spring and summer I learn new growing techniques by practice. Every change in weather pattern teaches me something more as the plants adjust their growing habits to the weather. Each anomaly brought by insect or disease adds a chapter to my book of knowledge.

Isn't all of life like gardening? A continual pursuit of perfection..that perfect photo of the chocolate and wine coloured bouquet in the seed catalogues inspiring us? But we learn through ugly failure, the shriveled plant leaves of fungi that come from the very compost we thought would hold moisture. Psalm 90:12 says, "So teach us to number our days that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom."

Lord, help me use time wisely that I may learn and grow in wisdom. I think wisdom is when I rely on God to rule in my dreams. Knowledge is good but wisdom is a lifelong pursuit of action. Wisdom is trusting in God while learning more of God. Wisdom is reading the Bible in its perfection like a glossy seed catalogue while planting the seed in weakness and trusting in God to span the gap between the dream of perfection and the reality of the failures I create. Wisdom is the pursuit of His Perfection, not my idea of it. Wisdom is leaving the harvest time in His hands.

"I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that gives the the increase" 1 Corinthians 3:6-9 says. That is just how I did not choose the placement of all my garden plots and flowerbeds, I only work with someone else's vision and it changes to my dream. I only take others' work and build upon it. I have a Mom who sent us out in my early years to weed corn rows and she also rejoiced when I took over the care of the flowerbeds. She inspired a green thumb for me although she declares she has a black thumb. I have a Dad who tries conventional and new gardening practices and likes being a farmer.

I find asparagus and wild herbs coming up in Gordon Rowan's old garden spot behind our house. He lived here in the 1950's. The apple trees he planted pollinate my early blooming crabapple each spring. Large branches break off his apple trees and we cut them into small pieces for use in our smoker. We create our originals upon the works of others.

I start seeds in my house under grow lights, on top of my fridge, and on heat mats because my mother in law showed me gardening in winter was possible. I only build upon her years of experience with my own. I plant the seeds, my children help to water and weed, but God gives the harvest.

So I rejoice as the snow falls softly and I walk around the gardens to dream and plan. I paint from the pages of a seed catalogue. I set out trays of dirt under grow lights and cover small dry seeds. I water the seeds and trim the plants. I dream and work in my little plot of dirt as I wait for the most perfect Harvest of all harvests. Oh, then we shall see perfection! Not a snow covered dream but His reality!

"Now we see through a glass, darkly, but then, we shall see face to face."

-1 Corinthians 13:12