What I do: Gardening

First: my mother is home! After 3 long weaks, she is back. Yeah, Tuesday was a lesson in patience from the start, between trying to help with a store remodel where the carpent people were late and so having to push back the time from 8 AM to 2 PM to 5 Pm and then having nothing to do to Mom getting stuck in customs and missing the flight that would have her home by 11 AM, having to wait another 12 hours or so at the air port and go through a terminal evacuation we still don't know the cause of and barely getting on the last flight out for the day.
Why all these reminders to be patient? Only, looking back, I don't think it's just that. There's also a little lesson about relying on God. Especially for me, who had this terrible habit of worrying obsessively. If something goes wrong, I panic. If it's suggested that something could go wrong, I'm willing to expect the worst. Granted, I have also learned to pray when I'd rather cry, but that mostly comes out as "Please, please, please!".
So Dad and I spent an hour at the airport waiting for Mom. I had planned to do some people watching, but there weren't really many people to watch, and only a couple were real characters. It was good anyway. After Mom finally arrived, we drove home in the rain with one windshield wiper going crazy and catching the working one and knocking it off its track or something. 'Twas an eventful day, I must say.
(On a side note, Mom brought back for me an awesome pair of royal blue-striped "Peru pants", which I am currently wearing and loving more than I anticipated. I am happy.)
The next thing on the crazy family calendar is another missions trip for Mom and Dad in less than two weeks, and then school starts. And it's my last year! (Yes, pretty much forever. No college for me!) I'm so not ready for school.
Anyway. I did have something non-recapping to do, so I'll get to that.

I like gardening. Call me crazy if you must, but it's true. I like watching things grow, especially when I planted them myself. I like marveling over how such beautiful things can come from such tiny seeds or simple bulbs. I'm not so much a fan of planting as I am of watching, which is why I prefer perennials over annuals. One-time planting, a little watering and pruning, and we're set!
Until this year, I'd never grown any form of food. I don't know what prompted us to decide to start this year. We didn't even get anything in the ground until June. (Hopefully next year we can start from seed like we wanted to but weren't able to because of our crazy summer schedules that begin in April.)
I must say that this year was a learning experience. Most of the vegetables in the garden are things I don't even eat (take our 20+ tomato plants for example). But I loved watching them grow from sprout to mature plant, watching them blossom and start to produce fruit, seeing squash and cucumber and watermelon vines spread out all over the place and sometimes use the tomato trelllises for support. I don't know what to do with the cauliflower, cabbage, and lettuce. I don't know if we'll even get anything from them. But that doesn't really bother me.
We've been getting cukes and squash pretty steadily now since the beginning of the month. I never have been fond of either, but I decided that I might as well learn to enjoy them because it's homegrown goodness right at my fingertips and I felt bad for wasting it. So I chop up a cucumber here or there and toss it in my salad. I'm still not fond of it.
I think the cooling weather has been getting to the garden, though. Most of the squash leaves are browning (if that's even a verb!) and I think we're seeing the last of the cucmbers. It makes me kind of sad.
I don't know where I originally planned to go with this. Maybe spouting off how good it's been for me because it makes me happy to start my day by going out among the plants and marveling over how they grow. Maybe I'll say how this whole experience has been training for me in a number of ways, but has also made me aware of how bad my memory is. I've turned on the sprinkler and gone off to do something for a few minutes, then got preoccupied, and the next thing I know I'm drowing the plants because I left the sprinkler on for too long.
Guess I don't really have a purpose behind this. It's just a new part of my life that I've enjoyed, so why not share? (Well, that and I needed to blog but didn't have much to say. Sorry if I'm boring you. It won't always be like this, I promise.) It's a pretty straightforward, easy summer project with tasty results. Hopefully next year I'll be more prepared for cucmber vines that need support and actually knowing when to harvest plants.
Yup. I've found another hobby. Well, we'll see how I feel about it next spring.