Garden Truck

It looks like we may have access to our garden spot this year. It was behind the school and the school has renovations planned. I went to beg if they could hold off until September, and they said sure. Now it looks like with the inevitable delays we may even have a fall garden. This is a good thing, because it keeps the garden in a visible place in the community, and we can take advantage of the ground having been worked up. Additionally, we can get some manure this winter and have it working in the soil before we plant.

Jason Childs got a new ride and so he was getting rid of his beater truck, a 90 Dodge 150, used as a landscape truck. It is a beast, a truck only Jamie Svec could love, but not even him, because he is a Ford man… But for $250, I think it’s a good deal, bum power steering pump and all. It will be useful for loading up veggies, hauling manure. I wonder how many people will come shovel manure with us?

Harper has this great idea to let the kids paint the truck. She also has some blackboard paint, so I may paint the door with that and hang a piece of chalk off the mirror, to write pithy things like “Turn or burn,” and “get right or get left.”

Getting ready for the new season has me thinking about how the garden should go. Corn, it seems to me, can be a waste. A lot of space and waiting for one shot of corn. Beans keep producing. I think this year, fewer tomatoes, more beans, more okra, more cukes, lots of onions, and definitely lots of cabbage.

I think, also, that this year, with some gardening under our belts, we’ll be able to use the garden more productively. I don’t mean for vegetables. I mean to grow fruit in our lives. We have the “social” side of community. That is, we get together reasonably often. But we neglect the two deep things that build community: prayer and common work. We have to break away from thinking we need more time “with” each other, getting to know each other in ways that, frankly, Kiwanis club or sororities do better. We need more time in prayer, the place where we get to know each others’ hearts. If week after week, we heard each others cries in prayer, joys in prayer, intercessions in prayer, victories in prayer, we would know each other. [Just an aside. I get to know a lot of what John and Joe are thinking by what they want to pray about. They both, Joe especially, have been praying for God to send us someone. Now he thanks God for “sending us Jessie.”] And finally, common work. Not tasks or projects. Real human work together bonds us. So I look back to last year, and being selfish, I recall how much I enjoyed pulling rocks out of the garden with Jason Dillard, or having a long conversation with Maggie picking beans. And it has magnified importance now that the first real, in-depth conversation I had with Jessica was at one end of the bean patch, 2 months before either of us realized there was anything there.

We need two more houses to have community dinners. We have to do that to have the space for them to grow. We could really have some breakthroughs with inviting new people, with bringing new people into the church. It has been the main area of growth the last 6 months.

One thing has become clear: some of the new people who are here with us are also very gifted at helping and cooking, and perhaps they are the ones to host the new work. We have to find a way to be open to allowing them to not simply come, but to plan and participate in the work.