Granny Hat has been spending many happy hours in her garden tending her veggies and herbs. This last week delivered an abundant pea harvest, garlic galore, plump red & white onions, along with some beets, first year raspberries and radishes! As she pulled up bright red ones and then some long green wasabi varieties, she was humming to herself: “Plant a radish, get a radish, never any doubt; that’s why I love vegetables, you know what you’re about! Plant a turnip, get a turnip, maybe you’ll get two; that’s why I love vegetables, you know that they’ll come through!”
Her favorite off-Broadway musical, the Fantasticks, offers up a powerful parenting metaphor here, but Granny thinks the principle applies to so many other timely topics. She recommends sticking to tried and true facts of creation. To avoid confusion in the garden AND in life, she intends to rely on promised results she can count on. “What you sow, that you will reap.” (Galatians 6:7)
Back to those vegetables: “They’re dependable, they’re befriendable, they’re the best pal a parent’s ever known. While with child-er-en, it’s bewilderin’; you don’t know until the seed is nearly grown, just what you’ve sown.”
Granny Hat is surprised by her kids all the time. They have excellent senses of humor, seeds planted by their dad. They love adventure, again….Dad. Granny taught them how to cook and spell and hopefully a few other things.
Every fall, when Granny sits down with her seed catalogs to plan and dream she notices that all the gardening gurus have their “premier super select” categories, company favorites so to speak, the ones that never fail to thrive. When it comes to growing families, the premium select seeds to plant are the words of God. Nothing makes Granny happier than a harvest of testimony spoken by her family about God’s will and His leading. She wishes she had planted even more of those seeds, one can never plant enough.
A warning: these seeds from God’s Word are invasive. Some fall on rocky soil, some in the weeds, but when they fall on a fertile soil in a tender heart, they will take over the garden and change the landscape of mind and heart.
So, when Granny’s 2023 thru hiker, Christopher, texted that he was coming home from the PCT after 1000 miles because God made it clear to him that he should do so, Granny paid attention. He said his goal for this summer had been to finish the Pacific Crest Trail. His body was saying “yes”, and he was in great hiking health. His mind was loving the beautiful wilderness journey. His heart, however, was tugging at him; he was lonely, missing family. After years of deployment orders for the USAF, here he was self-deploying for a solitary, singular goal. God gave him a refreshed view of his goals and changed them up a bit. He still intends to hike the rest of the trail in sections but with people he loves and influences. Granny likes the sound of that; adding some WHOS to the WHAT and WHERE might help define the WHY of such an adventure.
She has included the last few PCT photos Christopher sent to close down this phase of thru-hike reporting.
Reader, if you planted a garden this year, Granny hopes you are enjoying the fruits of your labor, God’s blessings indeed! Granny planted mildweed last year in the hopes of attracting Monarch butterflies to her garden. Her wildest dreams came true and she spied 9 caterpillars stripping her mildweed plants. She was torn between love for the plant and love for the caterpillars but Google assured her that if she trimmed the naked stems down to 6 inches after the feast was done, the plants would sprout new leaves. Google was right! The fat caterpillars disappeared overnight, the plants revived and then Granny Hat spied her miracle! A perfect be-dazzled cocoon hanging from her porch handrail. Its spots were glittering golden lights. She was fascinated and started reading all about monarch metamorphosis. In a few days, the cocoon turned dark hunter green and she could spy the outline of a wing through its translucent skin. Suddenly at about day 10 it went black and Granny kept her eye on it but while she was sleeping, that butterfly escaped, free at last! She is sure she saw that very Monarch the next morning on her bee balm plant.
So here is a gardening anomaly that defies the “plant a radish, get a radish” rule. Granny learned that if you plant a mildweed, you will get a Monarch!
“While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease.” Genesis 8:22