My Garden, Year Two

This is the second year my college mentor has given me space in her vegetable garden for a garden of my own. This year, I was much more savvy in my planning, so I'm expecting (and praying!) to have a better harvest than last year. We're off to a good start! I thought I'd post some pictures of my garden here to get you oriented to what I've planted. It's always fun to have pictures from the beginning of a garden and I'll be sure to post more when the garden is in full production in August/September. Here are two views of my garden:

 

The picture above shows all the plants expect my tomatoes and one cucumber. In this main part of the garden, I planted potatoes (front left corner), beans, tomatoes, a cucumber, carrots (which I had to replant once), peas, basil, rosemary, chives and green onions. I also planted marigolds, hollyhocks, cosmos and zinnias because I love having fresh flowers. I have a couple volunteer plants from last year that sprung up, including dill, calendula (a flower), snapdragons, a nasturtium, and parsley. As I was weeding today, I pulled up tons of baby hollyhocks and snapdragons that had re-seeded themselves. :) Here's a couple close-ups from the garden:

 

Dottie, my college mentor, and I also decided to try experimenting with straw bale gardening this year. Straw bale gardening was invented as a way to garden successfully even with poor soil. The Mohrlangs have an empty lot next to their house that will be the future home of a Whitworth professor when he gets around to building a house on the lot. In the meantime, he let us use his property for our straw bales. I decided to plant tomatoes, cucumbers, zucchini and a pepper plant in my straw bales. Here's hoping they thrive! The first picture below is our whole straw bale garden. Dottie's bales have dirt on top of the whole bale while mine just have dirt directly around the plant:

 

A Romanian Rainbow pepper plant:

 

This is a view down the row of bales. You can see a Siletz tomato in the foreground, then a Black Krim tomato, a couple zucchini plants, and English cucumbers at the very end. I also planted two Sun Gold tomato plants given to me by a co-worker, and a lemon cucumber plant.



I love having a garden. I like thinking about God giving Adam the job of stewarding the earth in the Garden of Eden. Gardening is labor intensive (if my sore back after weeding is any indication), but it's also freeing to dig my hands into the dirt after a week of sitting at a desk in front of a computer. It's good to use my hands instead of my head and my whole body instead of just my fingers. Pray with me that my garden grows and that I can be generous with the fruit it bears!

Have you planted a garden this summer? What did you plant?

Life Around the Table

For a while, I was going through a dry spell with reading. I hardly read anything except cooking blogs and then only scanned through recipe after recipe. Then I house-sat and couldn't get the Wifi password to work. You might call this a saving grace. Besides hosting several groups of people, I also re-discovered my normal hankering for reading. My housemate asked me tonight: "How many books do you normally have checked out from the library?" Without hesitation, I answered, "About 30." Many are fated to only ever sit in stacks on my desk, bookshelf, and nightstand, but, if a book is lucky, I'll actually read it.

Such was the case with a new book called Bread and Wine: A Love Letter to Life Around the Table by Shauna Niequist. I just finished the book today and loved every sentence of it. Shauna, if possible, loves food even more than I do. It was a comfort to read the book and know that I'm not the only one in the world whose love of food veers towards obsessive. (Just ask my friend who went with me to Trader Joe's yesterday.) Better than that, Shauna grounds food and meals solidly in the living out of a faithful Christian life. You don't have to be a foodie to do this. In fact, I have a friend who hates cooking. But when it was her turn to host the Children's Ministry Committee from church, she made us a wonderful waffle, bacon and egg meal. Whether or not she enjoyed putting it together, there's no doubt that the meal unified us and prepared us for the discussion and prayer portion of our meeting.

Bread and Wine is full of stories from Shauna's life. Most of the stories were things I could relate to whole-heartedly and have experienced numerous times in cooking: spontaneity, inconvenience, unexpected mistakes and successes both, meaningful conversation, working-with-what-you-have meals, and simple, memory-evoking pleasures. Shauna also made it clear that it's okay for meals prepared for other people to be flawed. Perfection isn't the goal; fellowship is. I was comforted by this. I've often had friends over for dinner and have been more concerned with how something I cooked turned out than with the people at my table. Besides, what's life without a little imperfection anyway? It's why we try again (and again and again).

I always have cooking experiences from which I can draw useful spiritual lessons. One in particular stands out from recent weeks: making baklava with my friend Janie. She was making two trays of baklava for two different events, and I'd always wanted to make it. I came over to her house one Wednesday evening, and we got to work. After melting something like seven sticks of butter, we unrolled bundles of filo dough, impossibly thin and delicate. Following the complex instructions carefully, we layered the filo dough and brushed it liberally with the melted butter. Every once in a while, we'd spread a pecan-sugar mixture in between the layers. In the middle of the directions, we realized that we were going to run out of filo dough. Fortunately, mishap though it was, no one will ever know that we used 20 sheets of filo instead of 30.

When all the layers were assembled, it took us a good 15 minutes to score the baklava into narrow diamonds, so the honey-sugar syrup could soak into every crevice. By this time, it was nearly 9 PM, and I had to work the next morning, so I didn't get to help Janie complete the baklava. However, at work the next day, I had a visitor stop by with a package:

 

 

Biting into the honey-soaked squares of baklava made the work of the night before worth it. Actually, I take that back. Walking around my office and sharing squares of the baklava with my co-workers made it worth it. It was seeing my co-workers' eyes light up and hearing the crackle of the baked filo dough as they took a bite that made the often inconvenient work of making the baklava worth the effort. It's a tactile way of connecting one person to another. It's a blessed sharing and receiving.  

 

Shauna writes: "This is what I want you to do: I want you to tell someone you love them, and dinner's at six. I want you to throw open your front door and welcome the people you love into the inevitable mess with hugs and laughter. I want you to light a burner on the stove, to chop and stir and season with love and abandon...Gather the people you love around your table and feed them with love and honesty and creativity. Feed them with your hands and the flavors and smells that remind you of home and beauty and the best stories you've ever heard, the best stories you've ever lived."

 

All I can say to that is: "Amen!" Go and do likewise.

Happy New Year!

Yes, I know. It’s been longer than a week. It’s been two and a half weeks, to be precise. Forgive me. :o)

I had a blessed time at home with friends and family. God has blessed me so richly. I had a wonderful time with my immediate family, lots of laughs and good conversations. Here’s a picture of Christmas morning. We’re eating our traditional pull aparts—bread dough, brown sugar, butterscotch pudding mix, butter, cinnamon; how can you go wrong?

Not sure why I thought I should smile in this picture instead of look ravenously hungry like the rest of my family. Perhaps I subconsciously knew that I planned to put the picture on this blog. :o)

I flew back to Spokane early Wednesday morning so that I could be at work by 9 a.m. I made it on time and worked full days on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday to make up for being gone. I am so thankful that I was able to take time off and still make up the time. Another gift of God while I’m working part time.

 

On Saturday, I picked up two friends at the airport who will be spending a month at Tall Timber Ranch for a class called Christian Spirituality with Jerry Sittser. I did this same class exactly three years ago, so we had a lovely time on New Year’s Eve, me remembering my trip and Amy and Christina looking forward to theirs. Maybe I’ll write a post about my time at Tall Timber. You actually live out a semi-monastic routine for the month and have no access to technology. It was a wonderful and challenging experience. Amy, Christina, and I had a progressive dinner that evening. We had delicious, garlicky tomato bruschetta at Christina’s house, cheese fondue and a sparkling strawberry drink at Amy’s, and apple dumplings at my house. It was a lovely way to usher in the New Year.

I have had the chance to host several groups of people in the past week, which I love to do. On Thursday night (12/29), I had four college friends over whose families live in and around the Spokane area. Three of the four are in grad school, so I don’t get to see them very often. For lunch on Sunday, my dear friends Tyler and Lydia Thralls came to my house to top off a quick weekend trip to Spokane from Vancouver, WA. On Monday night, I had Jerry, Mary Jane, Angela, and Jessica Leonardi to my house for dinner and dessert. Angela and Jessica are friends from Whitworth and their parents, Jerry and Mary Jane, live in Hayden, near Coeur d’Alene. I am so blessed to have hosted these friends at my house, and it reminded me how much I love to have people over for meals. I would like to have more people over in 2012.

Speaking of goals for the new year, I would like to write some of my goals down here. You don’t necessarily have to keep me accountable, but it’s just rather nice to have one’s goals written out. I would love to hear what some of your goals are for this new and blessed year. Please share them with me! Here are mine:

1.     Keep to my budget. I am thankful to have a budget (thanks Mom and Jules!) because it gives me boundaries for spending and saving, as well as the freedom to learn generosity and frugality both.*  It will be a new challenge this year, but one to which I’m looking forward.

2.     Walk at least 30 minutes 5-6 days a week. I would also like to do Pilates and strength training on a semi-regular basis, but we’ll see if that happens… :o)

3.     Eat as many fruits and vegetables as possible. Eat local as much as possible.

4.     Establish a rhythm of devotional reading and prayer. I’m not sure what this looks like yet, but I would like to incorporate Scripture, hymns, and liturgy (including prayers) into my devotions.

5.     Read at least two books a month, fiction or nonfiction. Since college, I’ve been reading mostly cookbooks. I need to get back into more rigorous reading. :o)

6.     Keep up with friends and family. Ask questions. Listen well. Pray for them regularly.

7.     Most of all, I want all these things to be bathed in the love and life given to us by Jesus Christ. I want each resolution to stem from a deep-seated desire to honor God with every choice I make, big or small. And I want to know Christ’s mercy when I mess up.  

*Frugality means to be prudent in saving, the lack of wastefulness. I think I have a negative connotation with the word, but it’s actually a positive word. It strikes me as a way to be a good and generous steward.

I want to leave you with a New Year’s hymn from “The One Year Book of Hymns.” May the Lord Jesus Christ bless you and keep you in this New Year. 

Another year of mercies,

Of faithfulness and grace;
Another year of gladness
In the shining of Thy face;
Another year of leaning
Upon Thy loving breast;
Another year of trusting,
Of quiet, happy rest. 

Another year of service,

Of witness for Thy love;
Another year of training
For holier work above.
Another year is dawning:
Dear Father, let it be,
On earth or else in heaven,
Another year for Thee.
 
-Frances Ridley Havergal