The garden this morning

"The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how." — Mark 4:26-27

The garden this morning is all potential and no evidence.

The tomatoes went in ten days ago and they are still just sticks with a few leaves, held up by cages that look ridiculous next to plants that small. The beans are two inches tall in a row that is not as straight as I thought it was when I planted it. The squash is there, somewhere, beneath the mulch, doing whatever squash does before it decides to take over. I put in herbs by the kitchen door last week, and they look like herbs that have been put in last week, which is to say they look startled.

This is the part of the garden I like best and am worst at. The waiting. The part where you have done the work and the work has not yet done anything back. Every year I stand out here in late May and look at a patch of dirt with small things in it and have to talk myself out of the conviction that nothing is going to come of it. Every year something comes of it.

Earl used to say I gardened the way I worried, which was thoroughly and with too much attention to things I could not control. He was not wrong. I have been known to stand over a tomato plant and ask it what it needed, out loud, which is a thing I do not tell people. Junebug watches me from the kitchen window when I do this. She is not impressed.

The iris along the front of the house have finished. The peonies are at their heaviest, the big pink ones that droop after a rain and have to be staked. I do not stake them. I let them droop. There is something honest about a peony that is too heavy for itself. It has given everything it had and it is tired from the giving, and I find that I can relate to that.

The evening will be long tonight. Light past eight. The garden will look different in two weeks, and different again in four, and by July I will be pulling squash off the vine and wondering what I was worried about. For now I am standing in the morning looking at a garden that has not yet become what it is going to be, and I am trying to leave it alone.

Lord, let it grow.

Ruby keeps a collection of prayers at her kitchen table. You can find them here.