Planting A Life: How Keeping A Garden is Good for the Soul (May)

By Rev. Judith Laxer

As a gardener, you engage with seeds twice during the year. Late Autumn for the gathering from what is dying and late Spring for the sowing of what will grow. You’ve been preparing the beds for the last few months, removing weeds, adding compost. You’ve walked around deciding exactly how you will rotate your crops this year, deliberating whether or not you will get the best yield if you plant the same crop in the same place as last year where they did so well. Some say never do that, some say all that matters is that the soil is amended, so plant at will. You’ve changed your mind again and again, but that’s part of the fun.

Though it’s a safer bet to plant vegetable starts here in the short Northwest growing season, and you do, there is something about the mystery of seed that is too intriguing and exciting to ignore. So you get the sweet pea, pumpkin and nasturtium seed you harvested last year, and walk from bed to bed holding them in your green-thumbed hands, imagining their fruition, listening as they silently tell you which ones want to grow here, which ones there. Now is the time to get them in the Earth. ...