GARDEN GREETINGS!!
We — Coleman and LeAura — missed last week’s newsletter as we were celebrating our 33rd wedding anniversary. We’re counting our many blessings, and for sharing this life with all its ups, downs and sideways-ness. Above all, our prevailing theme is gratitude.
Meanwhile… we’re enjoying seeing so many wonderfully abundant garden harvest photos from the GardensAll and Planting for Retirement Facebook communities. Plus those that folks are sending via email.
IT’S THE LITTLE THINGS
Before delving into the topics at hand, Coleman here, sharing a recurring notion about focusing our awareness on the “little things” that make up our world. I know you understand the joy and exhilaration of mornings in the garden.
It’s profound enough to make the most crusty amongst us wax poetic and maybe even experience a “dew drop” in the eye.
So this morning, when spying a tiny toad hopping about the compost bin, the notion occurred as to how many tiny, yet perfect little creatures inhabit our backyard garden.
And recently, our son, Nikolai found the tiny baby frog in the free wood chip mulch he was shoveling. You can see both in the featured image above.
You can see and read more on garden-friendly toads and frogs here.
But these little causes to pause in our busy-ness is part of what life in the garden is all about. It was a reminder to pay closer attention to the subtle, yet precious, denizens of nature that play their part in the web of life no matter how miniscule.
ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL
By extension, we can appreciate our relative size and rank in relation to the vast cosmos where we too play a part. And rather than feeling diminished, I experience a rush of gratitude for being, in a relative sense, just like that tiny toad going about my business.
FROM THE GALAXY TO THE GARDEN
Okay… back down to this blessed earth...
Our little garden is yielding its bounty now on a daily basis. Here’s a sampler box of pickings which displays beans, tomatoes, and eggplant. Unlike previous years, the tomatoes were transplanted in stages. Rather than experience a backlog, what we consume and what we harvest is balanced.
Remember, unlike most of you, we have limited sunny spaces, so we don’t usually have enough left extra to can like many of you are fortunate to be doing now. So we're staging the plantings to stage the harvests.
But we do have enough to freeze veggies like cucumbers (once we’re full to the brim with refrigerator pickles), and also string beans.
