One Strong Woman

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I love many things about living in south Texas, but the tap water is not one of them.  Michigan boasts terrible water.  Virginia's water is an improvement over Michigan's, which isn't saying much.  Texas's water rates somewhere in there with the not-so-great water of Michigan and Virginia, and since living here, we've resorted to buying all our drinking water.

It's a far cry from the fabulous well water in Washington and Alaska my husband and I both grew up on.

I confess hauling and pouring water ranks pretty low on my chore enjoyment scale.  Every time I go fill up the five-gallon jugs, or pour water out of the five-gallon jugs into smaller jugs for daily use, I groan inwardly and wish someone else would do it for me.

Then, every time, I remember Rebekah.

Rebekah, who not only poured water but also drew water from the wells or troughs long enough to quench the thirst not only of human guests but of camels.  Rebekah, who must have been one strong, in-shape woman, working in a climate perhaps similar to my own.  Rebekah, who wasn't afraid of a little--or a lot of--extra physical work.  

Rebekah, whose attitude of cheerful, extra-mile service above all other qualities recommended her to be Isaac's wife and Abraham's daughter-in-law.

All these thousands of years later, every time I haul water and pour water and start out inwardly complaining that I'm stuck doing a chore I really don't like, Rebekah's story humbles me.  

By the time I finish hauling and pouring I'm inspired to exercise more often so I can be strong like she was, change my attitude so I can go the extra mile like she did, and do these acts of service in my home cheerfully like Rebekah would.

Life is Hard

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Or is life just funny?  

I don't frequent either of these establishments, but I laugh every time I pass their corner.  Do the Weight Watchers participants have to fight temptation before and after every meeting?  Do the ice cream customers get a visual reminder to eat healthier every time they order their cones?

Music Lessons from the Plumber

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Maybe this is terrible, but I secretly look forward to having the plumbers come.  Not because I desire a problem--no, I don't have a lot of time for extras of those.  But these guys are hard-working, friendly people, and I always enjoy their attention to courtesy as they take care of life's basics around the house.

I think that's what one of my favorite uncles is like as a plumber (I'm allowed to have more than one favorite uncle, right?), although I've never been out on the job site with him.

Today's visit from the plumbers didn't disappoint.  As we talked about the details of parts and next visits, I mentioned my up-coming responsibilities as choir accompanist at a local school's music festival at the end of this week.  The conversation turned to the piano gracing the living room.

"I think it was built in 1907," I told them.

They did the math.  Yes, 108 years old, as far as we know.  Amazing, right?  

Turns out, one of the plumbers is also a musician who plays several instruments.  He told me how he learned to play by sheer effort and commitment.  And you know what?  I think he had a lot of wisdom to share with this piano teacher and her students.  It was just the affirmation and encouragement I needed in this busier-than-usual music making week.

Making Music Takes Discipline

That's no surprise to me.  I've been making music for a lot of years, and I'm still making music because at each step I've stayed disciplined.  The plumber said playing accordion didn't come easily to him.

"Why can't I do this?" he asked himself, over and over and over.

But he didn't give up, and neither did I.  Now we're both musicians for life.

Making Music Takes Priority

If learning to play your instrument isn't a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly priority, you will never learn to play your instrument well.  The plumber said he turned down countless invitations as a young man to go have fun just to keep trying to play.  Even before he was good at playing.  

He simply wanted to play, and he knew it would take making his instrument a priority if he was every going to learn.

Opening the Musical Ear

And you know what?  All that discipline and all that priority eventually "opened the musical ear", as he put it.  

"Once the musical ear is opened," he told me, "there's no stopping it."

He's entirely self taught.  He tunes all his instruments by ear.  He hears things other people can't hear.

Because he kept at it, day in and day out, until he could play.

Garden Friends

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My mom e-mailed today to tell me it would have been her dad's birthday.  The photo she attached shows him kneeling in his garden, face turned up, cowboy had securely placed, surrounded by rows of good things to eat.

He died thirty-five years ago.  I'm not thirty-five yet, which means I never met him.

I do hear stories of how generous he was, both with money and garden produce.  I hear how he made soda water pancakes when everyone went camping (or at least got credit for them...it's hard to tell from the stories just how much help he really got from my grandma!).

And I hear about his garden.  How he grew enough corn to dry and grind for their own cornmeal--enough for a family of two parents, eight children, and who knows how many guests arriving who knows with how much notice.

That's a lot of corn meal.

I hear about how he bought ladybugs to come into the garden and eat the aphids.  I've been glad to see more ladybugs in the garden this year, but I haven't bought any. 

Unless you count the ladybug nail clippers and the ladybug squeeze toys I bought for my piano students, to remind them to clip their nails and curve their fingers.  But that's different.

I do think my grandfather and I would have been good friends.  Even if we wouldn't have had anything more than gardens in common.  Gardens, after all, can take up enough of life to be enough for a good bond.

And do you see who else came to the garden this spring?  They chose the right time this year, when the dill was big and I was already letting it go to seed.  We ended up with three little guys, as far as I could tell. 

In these photos, they're probably ready to run off and find somewhere to hang as chrysalises for a while, but I haven't figured out where they went to do that.  I hope they chose safe places.

I still can't get over their adorable stumpy feet.

You'll notice that the dill looks a bit beat up and ragged.  It has good reason to.  A week and half ago, my neighbor called to warn me that a bad storm was coming. 

My husband was home on lunch break, so we quickly shut the windows, gathered the littlest potted plants and put them under cover, and said a prayer for protection.

Then the hail started, with stones an inch and a half across.  It was like the sky was hurling ice cubes everywhere.  Some hit windows.  The hail lasted about five minutes, and in the end there wasn't significant damage, even in the garden--except for a few broken dill stems.

And we are grateful indeed.

Three Best Small Space Edible Plants

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When we bought most of our current seed collection, we had a large garden in mind, with room for everything we wanted.  We had no idea at the time we'd be moving to a place that, although it would have year-round growing possibilities, would be anything but spacious enough for everything we wanted.

In that sense, this list of the three best plants to grow small gardens in order to eat from your garden every day came from an unlikely large-space mentality.

In fact, I think that mentality is what has made our daily eating-from-our-garden goal possible day in and day out for the last seven months.  We just start the seeds and figure out where they'll be transplanted later!  There's always one more corner, or one more pot, where another plant will fit.

But even with that mentality, we did manage to stumble on a strategy that works well for bringing daily bounty onto our plates even in our small garden, and I think three of our plants have made it not only possible, but delicious. 

I love every plant in our garden, but these are the three that for the last seven months have been the most versatile, fitting easily into a wide variety of meals.

Basil

Since basil is good in several types of cuisine, we've found it to be one of our most versatile plants.  Last summer, I think we had twelve or thirteen plants for our household of two people.  Using a great pruning method, we had enough to use ourselves, to preserve, and to share with friends.

Dried:  I use dried basil in soups, home-made vegetarian chicken-like seasoning, and as a flavor for roasted vegetables, to name a few things.  Even when there's not much being harvested in the garden on a daily basis, the dried basil is so versatile that getting something into my mouth from the garden has been easy.

Pesto:  We happen to love pesto.  We eat it fresh, and we freeze extra batches to use for later.  And lest you think pasta is the only place for pesto?  Try it on toast, on potatoes, in stir fry, or even baked into a loaf of bread.

Fresh:  Bruschetta, chunky sphagetti sauce, and even as a salad tossed with sauteed garlic and onions and a bit of olive oil are just a few of the ways we've discovered to enjoy fresh basil.  It even works in green smoothies--as long as there are some other greens in there to help balance out the strong basil flavor.

Parsley

It doesn't take too many parsley plants to supply the average person's need, but somehow we've ended up with, let me count, fifteen parsley plants in different stages of development.  Each plant can get huge, especially if your weather stays cool for a long time, which keeps them from going to seed, and you can just keep cutting from the same plant for quite a while.  Even though we've found ways to use a lot of fresh parsley ourselves, we've also been able to find friends to help us enjoy the garden bounty.

Fresh:  Parsley is an excellent garnish for hummus, it's great in scrambled tofu (or eggs) and hash browns, and in stir fries.  But one of our favorites has turned out to be using parsley as a salad green, especially in combination with cilantro (just use equal parts of each, and add whatever other salad fixings you love). 

Dried:  I don't use dried parsley nearly as often as I do dried basil (or even dill), but it's another versatile herb to use for seasoning all kinds of things, and therefore a great way to sneak in something from the garden at times when other fresh things might not be so readily available.

Red Sweet Peppers

Last spring we got some dried Guajillo peppers from the store.  They're a mild red pepper, and my husband wanted to try them in his home-made enchilada sauce (which is awesome, by the way).  He couldn't bear to let all the seeds from those dried peppers go to waste, so he tried sprouting some of them.

And that is how we ended up with a small Guajillo pepper forest in our front flower bed.  I'm sure they're all planted too close, but once you have all those plants you simply can't let any of them die.  So planted too close they are, and in an odd place at that.

Given the right conditions, pepper plants will produce loads of peppers even if they're grown in pots.  Last season, my father-in-law (who grows several varieties of hot peppers) harvested close to 1,000 peppers from one plant. 

Needless to say, you don't need a lot of space to accommodate a pepper plant or two if they're in a pot, especially with that kind of bounty coming from each plant!

Fresh:  These sweet peppers--or any other kind of red sweet pepper, I might add--fit easily into any salad, stir fry, salsa, taco, or vege platter.  

Dried:  When they're dried, any red pepper (in my opinion, at least) works well as a paprika substitute.  Talk about versatile!  Soups, sauces, home-made potato fries, and stir fries, not to mention enchilada sauce, are all great options for using a dried red pepper.

Mighty Men of the Bible

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Once you get past the nine chapters of genealogies in 1 Chronicles, it's not long before you get to a couple more chapters of lists.  These grab my attention more quickly than the genealogies.

First there's the guy who, in hand-to-hand combat, slew three hundred enemies at once.  Or the three men who planted their feet in a barley field and held the ground against the entire Phillistine army, and later battled their way through "the host of the Phillistines" simply to bring David a glass of water from his favorite well.

The lists of mighty men and their accomplishments continue on, with one eye-widening story of strength after another.

Then, as the lists of mighty men progress from David's time as a fugitive to David's early years as king in Hebron, some more mighty men caught my attention in a new way.

"And of the children of Issachar, which were men that had understanding of the times, to know what Israel ought to do; the heads of them were two hundred; and all their brethren were at their commandment."  1 Chronicles 12:32

Oh, that spiritual Israel now would have two hundred and more mighty men (people), strong in their understanding of our times, to know what God's people ought to do!  And oh, that each Christian would strive the harder to gain such wisdom and understanding as God has promised to those who simply ask for it.

Because our times, too, are important in the history of God's people, and our times, too, demand understanding.

March Loveliness

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Is there anything so beautiful as dill plants in full flower?

On cloudy days, the blossoms catch my eye, their bright yellow acting as a substitute sunshine for the back yard, and I bask in their rays.  How pollen can seem to glow like that I still haven't figured out.

On sunny days, they make the perfect compliment for their blue-sky backdrop, stretching up above my head as if they want to reach as high as the sky.

I remind myself the unstoppable Texas heat is on its way, but right now, while the days are warm and the nights are cool and the humid air feels welcome and fresh, the garden and I bask in March loveliness.

The cayenne plant, I feel sure, grew several inches last week.  The bee balm put out more branches and looks like a respectable patch, when just a few days ago you could hardly tell if it would ever do anything ever.  The parsley row needs to be made into a hundred salads to keep it from going to seed soon.

And the dill?

It's hosting at least one little friend caterpillar who will turn into a black swallowtail butterfly, and the whole patch is making seeds enough for us and all our friends.  

Gardens are, after all, prolific.