One Small Step For A City Girl

After my last post expressing my ambitions to start a mini-garden this year, a good friend of mine offered to spend the day with me and share all her gardening knowledge. Thanks to all her help, I now have a growing garden, including peas, tomatoes, lettuce, mint, oregano, basil, and later, rosemary and nasturtium. Here they are last Sunday, the day after we planted them.

Basil:

 Drying basil; the plant was already big enough to harvest some!

Pineapple Mint:

 

Oregano:

 

Lettuce and Pea seeds:

And the peas and lettuce in planters:

 

Tomatoes seeds and planters:

Five days after planting, the lettuce sprouted!!

The next day the peas sprouted, and the day after that the tomatoes sprouted. Here's what they all look like today, one week after planting.

Basil; the basil that I harvested is dried and ready for use:

Mint, which I harvested right after taking this picture, and am now drying for tea:

 

Oregano, which needs to be harvested and dried; it grows quickly!

 

Peas and Lettuce: 

Tomatoes:

 

So, all those pictures to say this: my garden is growing!!!!!!! Hopefully this year, I'll actually be able to grow some edibile veggies. Tonight for dinner I'll be using some of the dried basil and well as some fresh basil leaves to make margherita pizza. so at least I've grown something that is useable! 

On a slightly more serious note, this whole gardening this is really teaching me a valuable lesson in patience. After I planted the seeds, I wanted to see sprouts right away. I hated the waiting, because I didn't know if the seeds were doing anything under all that dirt. But all I could do was water and wait and hope. And in the end everything has sprouted! Now that things are sprouted however, and especially with the herbs, the growth isn't drastic. It's slow....so slow that I almost don't notice it. That's why I'm taking the pictures: so that I can see how the plants change. 

I feel like life is a lot like that. God's plans are like the seeds. I know He's planted them, I can see the beginning of them, but now I just have to watch and wait and hope that there is something happening under the surface. Also, when God is working in our lives and hearts, the change is slow. The day to day difference in us is so unnoticeable that it is easy to get discouraged. Yet after while if we look back, we can see the change; we can see what He has done. And that is very encouraging!