About Garden Devotions

My family always had a large garden when I was growing up.  At the time, I thought it was merely a hobby my mother and father had, just something our family did.  As I grew older, I discovered the real purpose of our garden, to provide food for us, especially during those weeks when my father wasn’t getting paid.

My mother and father did the planting (probably to make sure it was done correctly because our stomachs were riding on it), and we kids were enlisted to weed and harvest.  Being the youngest, I learned some about gardening, but not really that much.  I was awesome at pulling weeds, but never did like doing it, and after a few rounds of heat exhaustion when I was a teenager, the sun and I had never been too friendly.

But this year I had a neighbor who inspired me to do a bit of gardening.  She loved working in the yard and she set up a couple of small beds along the side of her house that faced mine.  Whenever I looked out the window, I saw her working in her little garden, in a world of her own, leaving all her other cares behind her.

I was very sick through all of April and May of 2012 so I was confined to my house for the most part.  About that time my doctor told me that my vitamin D level was the lowest he’d seen (and then after a pause, he added, “in a long time”).  He suggested more time outside in the sun to help raise that level along with a heavy duty supplement.

So, armed with 5 big empty cat litter buckets with holes drilled in the bottom and two small ones I’d cut the tops off of, I planted an overly ambitious amount of seeds in those very small spaces.  Within a few days, tiny green plants started appearing in the containers.  I was excited enough with this small attempt at gardening that my father built me a 4′ x 8′ raised bed and delivered it a couple of weeks later along with a truckload of dark black dirt.  Because of my continuing illness, it was almost two weeks before I had the small bed completely planted.  For my daily dose of vitamin D, I’d sit by the garden and scan it for any new signs of green pushing out of the soil.

Overall, the garden was my therapy when I could do barely anything.  That’s what is incredible to me, that God created little seeds with all the instructions they need to grow and produce, even for someone like me who can’t do much to help them.