God’s New Thing Brings Forth a Blessed Garden

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The crazy little spring garden that God inspired Cheryl and me to start last month has already been a learning experience, and yesterday I mentioned my plans to start posting about those blessed lessons. My idea, I suppose, is that this will become an on-going series for this site.

We are caring for at least 15 different types of plants these days and, as I think on it, I can relate at least one or two interesting stories/lessons from our experiences with each of those so far. (And that’s from just the first 3-4 weeks of this garden!) So I’ve got some typing to do!

I had in mind to start with the exiting potato lesson currently in progress. We learned last year that probably the most common way to grow home potatoes these days is in five-gallon buckets. And, this year, it seems we have finally heard the full story about how to do that right. So far so good, anyway. The first few of the chits we planted have this week started poking above what my new secret man crush Hollis (of Hollis and Nancy) calls the “green line,” and I’m excited to share those pictures along with the full story of how we plan to proceed. (Because, friends, I’m coming to understand that potatoes are truly a “year-round” plant. You can start some buckets yourself pretty much any time, and I’d love to inspire you to do just that.)

But I think I’m going to just tease you with that.

My next post might be about the potatoes. Or maybe it’ll be about the strawberries (which are anything but the duds we ended up with last year), or the squash/cucumber trellis built by neighborly love, or the weird little story of our mystery carrot seeds and their mushroom visitors, or the funny stuff the pomegranate tree is doing, or our first-ever success at getting lettuce seeds to pop out of the ground, or about how, despite last-year’s great success with those hanging tomato planters so many of our friends swear don’t work, this year’s cherry tomatoes on our porch are struggling a lot.

Frankly, I don’t yet know what the next post will be about. I just pray it’ll be a blessing. I’m biased, of course, but I think all these stories God is teaching Cheryl and me through this fun little garden are worth reading. Alas, as I say, I’ve got some typing to do. I pray ya’ll will be patient. The lessons and stories seem to be mounting fast. In the middle of typing this paragraph, I just added three more ideas to my back-log list.

For now, I think it’ll be fun to just give you a little introductory tour of everything we’ve got going. And then I’ll take it from there as the Lord gives me inspiration for more Garden Story posts.

But, before I jump into that, I want to properly connect this blessed garden to the Godly context of this extraordinary period in our earthly history. And, to do that, the Lord sends me to the book of Amos for a verse that points back to that other extraordinary period He brought to my mind this Easter: Israel’s freedom from exile in Babylon.

“I will bring my exiled people of Israel back from distant lands, and they will rebuild their ruined cities and live in them again. They will plant vineyards and gardens; they will eat their crops and drink their wine.” — Amos 9:14.

Cheryl and I are far from alone these days in our quest for enhanced gardens (and gardening skills). I can think of at least five dear friends who are, like us, stepping up their games this year in significant ways. And I know a handful of others who are gardening for the first time ever this spring.

It’s no coincidence God has set gardening so prevalent on so many hearts during this “shut down” period. His Glorious New Thing for Freed Israel brought new gardens to Jerusalem too. And Praise the Lord for that!

So, without much further ado, I present the stars of this spring’s forthcoming blessed performance by the little ole’ garden God’s got going here in Don and Cheryl’s yard in good ole’ Sweeny, Texas, USA. (I took all these pictures on Thursday, April 16. You’ll notice we don’t have any grapes yet going for the wine God seems to have prescribed. But, seriously, that’s been in my long term plans for months. I’m still sorting through the best methods for my local area. Alas, I guess I need to add that my “post about” list. Oh yeah, I’m listing all plants in alphabetical order. I don’t want any of them thinking getting their feelings hurt because they think I’m playing favorites. We want only encouraged and upbeat plants in this garden!)

Our Blessed Beans

Cheryl is looking forward to canning a lot of green beans this year. We planted only about six of these little guys last year and, for some reason, figured we’d end up with hundreds of beans. Didn’t happen, of course but the couple of dozen beans we did get whetted our appetite for what you see here. Bean City coming soon!

Our Kooky Carrots

This one of our two containers growing carrots. We currently have some unsolved mysteries relating to these guys. I’ll explain those in my future posts about our carrots.

Our Curmudgeonly Cantaloupe

The cantaloupe haven’t emerged from their little mounds yet. But friends keep telling me they are waiting for a bit warmer weather. Hmmmm. That’s interesting. Because it doesn’t explain the two cantaloupe vines sprouting up (apparently from seeds we planted last year) in the lettuce picture below.

Our Courageous Corn

Before we planted this corn, I engaged in a weeks’ long battle with ants that took over this bed during the fall and winter. I didn’t want to put poison all over a spot where we intended to grow corn (or anything), so I tried a combination of just rudely shewing the ants away (not very effective) and the those awesome stakes that kill off ant colonies by fooling the workers into delivering trace amounts of poison to their queen. (Those work well, but not always quickly.) In the end, I gave in and planted the corn while we still had a few ants hanging around. These little guys came up strong, and are doing well. Two or three new seedlings still emerge almost every day, and we’ve seen no sign of ants in at least two weeks.

Our Creative Cucumbers (and Silly Squash)

This trellis for our cucumbers and squash came together in a clever — and blessed — way. I’ll share that story in a future post.

Our Topsy Turvy Tomatoes

This is one of seven cherry tomato plants hanging on our front porch. As you can see it’s got about 12 nice tomatoes going, but the other six plants are struggling and we can’t figure out why. This is our second using our Topsy Turvy planters. And, though so many have told us the hanging system simply doesn’t work, we had a fairly bountiful, consistent harvest from our three planters last year. So we’re still fans — despite this year’s semi-rough start. And, if you want one of the planters yourself, order it through the link above, and I’ll get a small commission on the sale.

Our Terrific Tomatoes

This is one of the seven “beef steak” tomato plants we have growing. They are all going well, and we just learned some important leaf trimming tips today. Will post about those eventually. :)

Our Lovely Lettuce

We’ve tried lettuce at least five times before over the years, and never saw any sign of life above ground. Praise the Lord we’ll be culling some of these babies soon. (Sad, I know, but part of gardening.) Yes, that’s the aforementioned cantaloupe waving proudly on the right. (Another one is outside the picture.) I think he believes he’s a lettuce head. We don’t intend to tell him otherwise.

Our Pretty Peaches

I ate 25 peaches from HEB in the summer of 2018. We saved the seeds in the fridge until January 2019 when they’d sprouted, and we planted them in these pots. These are the nine that popped out baby trees. Sometime in the coming months (when the stems are about pencil thickness), we’ll graft them of a nursey tree (not pictured, but growing well) we bought last year. Follow the progress of this blessed little experiment in future blogs.

Our Peculiar Pomegranate

We bought this tree from a nursery last year, and this is the first sign of fruit we’ve seen so far. I’ve had a lot of pomegranate trees in my yards over the y ears, but I’ve never seen a baby fruit that looked like this. I’m intrigued, Lord.

Our Perfect Potted Potatoes

That’s a dead June Bug in our potato pot. The first couple of nights after we planted, the bugs started digging around in the pot. So we reluctantly sprinkled 7 Dust around the pot, and now the bugs are fertilizer. Yes, I realize 7 Dust is sort of controversial, and I’ll devote a blog to that topic sometime soon. And, more importantly, I’ll also clue you in on our plan for making sure these potted potatoes come out perfect this year. ( for once). (In the meantime, if you want to try seven dust, buy it through the above link and I’ll get a commission.)

Our Radical Radishes

Apparently, “French Breakfast Radishes” are all the rage these days, so we decided to get on board with the radical idea, even though I doubt we’ll ever have radishes for breakfast. Not even half of our seeds have sprung up yet, so, who knows how this is going to play out.

Our Sassy Strawberries

Last year’s small bunch of strawberries never produced a single bloom. This year we’re already on this, our fifth actual berry of the season. and, though all of the fruit have been small so far (which is sort of to be expected during a plant’s first year), Cheryl and several neighbors will testify they have been very tasty. We are looking forward to a lot of sass in this year’s bunch this summer.

Our Willy Watermelon

I have a grand plan for protecting our watermelon plants (and our canteloupe) from the squirels, raccoons and other critters who got our best harvest last year. But I need the vines to do their thing first, and, so far, this is all we’ve seen of our soon to be willy warriors.