Patience and Harvesting

Good morning Beloved! Yesterday, I had a major win and ate something VERY UNUSUAL from our garden that few would recognize as food, but thrilled me! Y’all know my garden is going, not producing a ton yet, and we planted all the fruit guilds and blueberry hill that will take a few years to _really_ produce. Gardening is a patience and vision game. The vision comes, you see it in YOUR mind and yet the plants are tiny, growing roots and the rest of the world cannot quite see where it is headed! But the soil has been prepared, the seeds and plants in the ground, the tending, nurturing and watering ongoing! A gardener can get a little weary waiting and in the next two weeks of blistering heat – we shall see.

Anyhow, I have always wanted to grow cilantro and for the most part, in multiple homes, I would FAIL! True story! I was the ultimate cilantro failure! But I never lost the desire – cilantro is chelating and full of health properties, utterly delish and makes me feel ALIVE!!! I grow salsa gardens and is a major component! I kept planting and failing forward and finally had some grow last year and then even saved seed!

Remember last December when I crazily felt as if the OBEDIENCE was to go plant seeds in my garden. Zone 7b, nobody plants a fall garden in Dec! We had Covid when we “should” have planted and thought we missed the season. But then that nudge, that whisper and I could not shake it. So I planted cilantro and Swiss chard and greens and called it a December garden and waited!

But I seemed to have heard that still, small whisper.

And so in the cold, I prayed and planted in December. I knew God would show me something OUT of that, if I had eyes to see! For months it was soil, then rain caused sprouts, and I was jubilant, then bitter cold killed it all. And yet I KNEW that God is faithful and if He whispered, and I obeyed, there would be at least a lesson in obedience at some point. (This is my single biggest gardening tip, by the way! Pray and obey!)

He did!!! Cilantro began popping up everywhere!!! Seriously! We have been harvesting cilantro since spring – putting it in and on everything! When I could not bear the food in the stores and struggle to eat ANYTHING, cilantro was popping in my garden and smelled amazing, and we we topped everything with these beautiful cilantro and herb mixes for months!

When the heat set in, the cilantro bolted and we enjoyed the BEAUTY of the tall plants with tiny white flowers. The tiny white flowers turn into seeds and that seed is called coriander, which is a “different spice” altogether than cilantro! Coriander is in a lot of my Indian dishes and curries! Out of one plant, I use cilantro, coriander seeds and ground coriander – 3 spice jars in the pantry! So, we harvested the seeds and dried them and had both cilantro SEEDS to plant for more cilantro and we have coriander for cooking!

I have not talked a lot about my struggle to eat, you would think I would be skinny – but it has taken a toll. Suffice it to say, since EarthFare closed, this whole insanity, the increasingly gross things being done to food, and having covid – which only briefly stole taste and smell (I worked hard to recover and have a story there if anyone else is still plagued). Anyhow, suddenly, for the first time in my foodie life – I detest food.

Food has always been my nourishing LOVE LANGUAGE! And it is gone. I cook for people and feed them with great joy, and that has become stress and yuck. I had a blog for years and shared recipes, taught cooking classes (still am) and love to cook and garden and am passionate about health, and this has been rather devastating. Food is literally disgusting to me, NOTHING sounds good – vs the JOY it was for decades. And I know I have to power through, adjust, grow more of my own (which is the ONLY thing that DOES appeal to me) and keep doing it until the joy flows back. I get that. But it has been an epic battle for a foodie.

So one of the things I do is keep ingredients on hand to make almost anything – so I am prepared if anything even remotely sounds good. This has been my cooking lifestyle for decades, INGREDIENTS! Ha! I make everything from scratch! Anyhow – my new thing is to grab a cookbook off the shelf, open a page, check if I have the ingredients and make that recipe. Boom, something NEW! That has helped me get thru!

Yesterday, I had opened a curry cookbook up to Beef Rendang, which we had marked to “try” before we moved here! Ha! This method is definitely increasing my repertoire of things I CAN cook and expanded the rotation.

And as I modified the recipe and stirred the spices in, foods from other cultures are ALWAYS about the spices, it was a brief momentary pause and PRAISE that the Lord flashed into my mind, that I was stirring coriander I had grown, from that December garden that seemed SO silly to plant after missing the time to plant because of the Ro Ro, from cilantro – the coriander seeds, that I had harvested from the obedience planting!

That is God! Way back in Genesis 1:29, “And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.” And there I was, sprinkling coriander, cilantro seed, into Beef Rendang for dinner!

Y’all, it was not perfect – but it was good and different and the fam said it was FABULOUS. And I as I crunched on a homegrown coriander seed and looked at the green onions fresh from the garden that topped it, just sat there having a JOY moment at the reality that my unique and beautiful garden is a GIFT from God Almighty and He knows what I need and He provides it.

Obedience is sweet my friends! Obedience is sweet! He is a good, good Father and He loves us with an everlasting love!