Gardening: Managing without a Garden....

Gardening
-plants a vineyard

It has been awhile since I have posted. This has mainly occurred because our family has had to attend a funeral for my husband's cousin last week. Sad occurance especially since he was not living a godly life before encountering the drowning accident. Although the event was sad, it was an opportunity to meet several members in the community where my husband grew up and be a light in the community.

We are back to a normal routine around here. Continuing with the Proverbs 31 series I would like to write about Gardening today. However, even though I will be writing about gardening, we are currently not gardening because we have moved away from our current garden patch and to raise a garden would be more time consuming and financially consuming than we are capable of managing at this time. I really love to garden and believe it should be an important part of every woman's life.....whether they are a Christian or not. In many cultures people cannot survive without raising a garden.

So how can a person live a simplistic life without a garden? For one, during the time of waiting for a garden patch it is important to cultivate your relationships. Secondly, you can seek to buy whole fresh foods whenever possible from a local market or store. I much prefer to cook and eat whole foods than foods which have been canned or processed. Without a garden it is difficult to "experiment" with new or unusual foods such as okra, various herbs and other oddities because our American diet does not usually consist of those types of items. However, by bringing those types of foods home, we are able to incorporate those foods into our diet. Typically, the cost for buying produce at the store far exceeds the cost of growing one's own food. However, if the location of your current home is not near a location where food can easily be grown or you are living in a location where the owners of the land do not want the property to be "disturbed" one must make do with what is available at the time. All in all, a garden can be grown on any property that is filled with soil......there is no need for such large lawns, it is only an American version of "perfection". The large green lawn vision heavily distorts people view of reality as far as knowing where food actually comes from.......it comes from the soil ;) And it takes a lot of work to grow it too.