Daily Joy: Home-growing

I come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses;
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear,
The Son of God discloses.

And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.

He speaks, and the sound of His voice
Is so sweet the birds hush their singing;
And the melody that He gave to me
Within my heart is ringing.

I’d stay in the garden with Him
Tho’ the night around me be falling;
But He bids me go; thro’ the voice of woe,
His voice to me is calling.

I love this hymnal because it is what I feel when I am in my own garden.

I love gardening.

So close to nature.

Covered in dirt.

Sweat on my brow.

I praise, then I pray.

I feel so unbelievably close to Him.

Toiling away in the garden.

It is a love that grew from a necessity.

A desire to be sovereign.

When we moved here (North Carolina) 3 years ago, it was already well into April, yet I longed for a large food garden. I was almost manic about getting seeds into the ground. But first the previous owner’s perfectly manicured lawn had to be cultivated. Our family spent long hours manually digging up the sod. My husband put up a 40 x 20 fence and the arched trellises I had always dreamed of as a little girl. I quickly, yet carefully sowed the seeds. And then waited…

The garden produced very little that year. I called it the “practice garden”. Making notes of ALL I did wrong.

The next year, the garden gave us a small harvest. I called it the “faith garden”. I had hope for the next year.

The third year, the garden produced abundance. I called it the “freedom garden”. We bought not one single item of produce from the grocery store that summer, well into fall. We were sovereign.

We are now into the fourth season on this property. We have expanded the food garden to 80 feet. And we began another garden. A pollinator garden.

My love for gardening has grown over the years. I wasn’t particularly interested in it up until my father died 4 years ago. Sparking something inside of me. My dad was a committed gardener. It was a part of who he was. We had a beautiful garden that bordered our front porch. There were large hydrangea bushes and hostas galore. Every evening in the warmer months, he would water ferns that hung from the front porch. It was a picture of the South indeed.

Dad also grew a small rose garden in the corner of our backyard. It had a rustic wooden fence and was always properly mulched. Nearby was a single satsuma tree with a bench beside it. My dad would sit there, wearing his straw garden hat and sweating from the Alabama heat, peeling and eating fruit, a sweet reward for his labor.

He told me once, while sitting beside him on that bench, “I always wanted a satsuma tree.” Dad grew up in the great Depression in a single shot-gun house with his parents and sister. A home and garden to call his own was more than he had ever hoped for.

Now I sit on our back porch, admiring all the hard work and beauty cultivated on this land so far. My heart swells with gratitude every evening. Although I prefer a grander garden than the single satsuma tree that brought my father a place of solitude. I find it here in the same way. And that’s what one needs to sustain a garden before all. A joy for it…