Saga In The Garden

I haven’t written much because I’ve been busy working in the garden and on my yard, along with trying to keep these kids alive. My garden was looking amazing! I had small tomatoes on a couple of plants and lots of blossoms on some of the other ones. My peas had flowers all over. The lettuce, swiss chard, and kale looked full and amazing. All kinds of stuff was coming up and I’d been keeping up with the weeding so all you saw were the beautiful garden plants. That all changed last night.

Yesterday evening my husband and I went out so I could plant the last of my tomatoes and pepper plants. While I was doing that, he took some straw and put it around our potatoes. I’m not sure if it works, but it’s supposed to make it easier to harvest them. A couple of the kids were out there helping us. Once we got done I took the baby inside to bathe and change his diaper. Robert went out the back way with our older daughter. I was so focused on the baby that I didn’t lock the gate. HUGE mistake. I also want to point out that I was fighting a headache that later turned into a migraine.

A couple of hours later one of the kids yelled out that there were sheep in the garden. Yep, sheep, about 15 of them. The sheep decimated it. Peas, gone. Lettuce, gone. Tomato plants, stripped to short, bare stems. They even cut down my patch of mint. I dragged myself out of my dark bedroom to look at the carnage. “Some of it might come back, but everything will be stunted now” I told myself, and my husband. I wanted to cry, but instead I took my pounding head back inside, took a couple pain killers, shut the curtains tight, and went to bed.

The next morning I discovered that overnight the sky shed the tears that I had refused to let fall. The ground was wet from rain and gray clouds covered the sky. The garden was just as bad as I had remembered from the night before. Tomato cages were askew, dirt was on the carpet between the beds from where it had fallen off of the roots when the sheep tore my precious plants from the ground. Deep, hoof shaped indentations churned up the formerly smooth soil of the beds right next to torn leaves that had once been part of the full foliage of a beautiful kale plant. There were no traces left of my cucumber plants.

A closer inspection did leave some room for a little bit of hope. The zucchini plants didn’t look touched at all. My tiny radish and spinach seedlings did not appear to have even been acknowledged. A few of the brand new tomatoes that I had planted in a couple of out of the way places were also not discovered by the sheep. The chard and kale can come back. I’ve seen it time and time again. As long as the roots are alive the plants will keep sending up new leaves. It will just take time. The same thing goes for the tomatoes. If I lived somewhere with a slightly longer growing season I wouldn’t worry as much, but we have a fairly short growing season. Mint is almost impossible to kill and it will for sure come back fairly quickly.

I firmly believe that God can take any tragedy and turn it into a blessing. If any of you have read The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom do you remember when lice were used as a blessing? Well, a decimated garden is a lot easier to deal with than a concentration camp and lice. I will just start watching for the blessings. In the meantime, I’m going to clean up the half masticated leaves, pull out the leftovers of the sheep feast, add some compost, and try to move on. If I can find plants to replace the ones that were cleared out, then that would be great. Maybe God needed the garden cleared because He knows I need to plant something different? I don’t know. I know I love gardening and I’m not giving up. I will grow something.