Our garden hasn’t produced like this picture in a couple years. We were late to plant last year because our schedule was busy. The weather was really rainy and really hot and then it got really cold, really fast. The conditions weren’t ideal for a flourishing garden.

In Jeremiah 4:3, the Lord tells the men of Judah and Jerusalem to break up their unplowed ground and not plant among the thorns because he is about to unleash the kingdoms from the north to desolate Jerusalem unless his people repent. That passage reminds me of our gardening skills.

At the end of our summer garden, we should break up the ground and pull the dead plants and weeds, but by the time we get to the end of our summer garden, life gets busy again and we get tired of doing garden work. So… we let the plants sit and we let the weeds and thorns grow. I’ll post a picture after I take one, but in winter, our garden area looks more like a home fit for rodents than a home for a flourishing garden. Come spring though, we always trudge through the grass and weeds and dead plants and dig and plow and replant. We always get some fruit from our labor, although some years it’s more plentiful than others. Last spring and summer, we did harvest a very small crop of broccoli (see my recipe for broccoli leaves because when you get a small harvest you want to savor every bit of work), basil (it was delicious in my citrus quinoa salad), cucumber (recipe coming soon – my favorite refrigerator pickles), a few very large zucchini and a few tomatoes (for a delicious tomato pie and even a cherry tomato enchilada sauce). In hopes for a late season picking, we kept the tomato plants in the ground after the first frost and finally got a large crop of tomatoes in the fall. They were green, but they ripened in a dark cardboard box. The wait was worth it and so was the extra work because I still have a freezer full of garden tomatoes for lots of homemade marinara sauce!

I often day dream in our garden and think of what fruit we would have gotten had we dug up the weeds and dead plants and plowed that tough red dirt sooner. Isn’t life like that sometimes? If we just dug up and pulled out those old habits earlier, we would have flourished already, but often, we don’t. We sit in the weeds and muck and wait until spring comes around to really do the work. We wait until we make a mistake or we start to see the mess we’ve made. We may even miss some opportunities while we sit among the weeds. I’m looking forward to digging out those weeds this weekend and plowing the ground for fresh fruit. Spring is here and it’s time to pick up the plow and get to work! Jesus is always here and always willing, we just have to pick up our Bible and let him do the work. Who knows, he may even plant some wild onion amongst the weeds to remind us that he is always with us even when life feels bittersweet.