Jesus and The Art of Pruning Tomatoes

(If you read here often then you know our family has a little vegetable garden in the back yard. What you might not know is that lately it seems this is the only place God speaks to me.)

Sometimes growth isn’t the solution, it’s the problem.

Given plenty of water and sunlight a tomato plant will literally grow itself into sickness. Stems fork indiscriminately, shooting at oblique angles that crowd other branches and leaves.

This crowding limits access to sunlight and can lead to disease, but the more surprising problem is too much fruit. The wildly branching “sucker” stems soon sprout blossoms that multiply the fruit of the plant. This may not sound like a problem – and early in the season it’s fun to see so much fruit on the bush – but that early promise never really pays off. Too many tomatoes rob the entire plant of the limited nutrients, rendering all the tomatoes too small to be useful.

By regularly pruning these “suckers” the tomato plant can be limited to a few (or even just one) growth stems that yield larger, healthier fruit.

For me, the difficult part of pruning is making the decision to cut off something I have been lovingly growing for quite some time. When you have much invested, it’s more than a little unnerving to cut off an entire stem, especially one that is blossoming. Often the decision is not between stems that are producing fruit and stems that aren’t – those are easy decisions. Sometimes it’s a judgment call: which are closer to the main stem? Which show the promise of stronger fruit? Which are getting in the way of the plant growing in a strong and stable way?

It may sound silly, but these can be agonizing decisions. It takes real courage to place your knife at the base of a strong stem and sever it from the stalk. This is particularly difficult when you fancy yourself an “organic” gardener and have fallen prey to the misunderstanding that “organic” means abstaining from structure or intervention. It’s easy to think that multiplication of fruit is better than the heartiness of fruit. But that is what it means to be a good gardener, to take responsibility for the health of the whole plant.

It turns out, it’s not enough to be organic; one must cultivate as well.

Technorati Tags: Church growth, discipleship, Gardening, Pruning

My Bad

Humor is a funny thing (pun intended). Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, something comes out of your mouth – or your keyboard – that blows up in your face.

On Saturday I posted something I thought was very funny: a picture of a scarecrow my kids had made in our backyard vegetable garden with the headline “We’re Celebrating Easter Weekend By Having a Real Crucifixion.” Now here’s how I thought that post would comes across:

Heavy and serious headline + cute and quaint family picture = lighthearted laughs

Not so much. Apparently at least a few people thought I was mocking Christ. I assure I wasn’t. If anything, I was mocking the tendency of missional/emerging Christians like myself to be overly serious and engage in increasingly contrived spiritual formation exercises like stations of the cross, labyrinths, etc. (this really was a self-critique…I’ve enjoyed doing both).

Anyway, like a joke that bombs on stage this one just didn’t play. Some people saw an offensive message; one that I didn’t intend. That’s not their fault, it’s mine. As a communicator I bear the initial burden of considering the variety of ways my words and images might be perceived, and the truth is I really didn’t consider that in this case. When that happens, an apology is necessary.

So…my bad. I blew it and it was my fault. If it matters, I wasn’t being intentionally irreverent in this case, and although I am often intentionally irreverent about inherited traditions, theological perspectives, and Christian culture (and generally don’t apologize for it), I would never be intentionally irreverent about Christ. Still, the burden of making that clear lies with me.

I’m pretty sure this qualifies as my first public apology. I’m also pretty sure it won’t be my last : )

Technorati Tags: apologies, Christ, Easter, Gardening

The Tale of Two Gardeners, An Easter Parable

I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds. ~ John 12:24

Jesus said to them, “I tell you the truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. ~ John 6:53

Once there were two men who longed for real tomatoes with good flavor – unlike the bland, waxy variety found in the chain supermarkets. So they both decided to start their own home gardens.

The first gardener bought the best seeds in the best seed catalog and picked out a nice patch of dirt behind his house with good sunlight. Since tomatoes are the gateway drug of home gardening, he couldn’t help but purchase a few pepper plants and eggplants too. He dug in the hard soil (there was a lot of clay in their area) and planted and watered his seeds, careful to space them apart properly, and reflecting on how – in a sense – the seed had to die before new life could spring from it.

Every day he was diligent to water and weed his garden and, sure enough, in about a week little sprouts poked through the surface. But neither the tomatoes nor the others plants grew as big as those in the catalog pictures, and although his tomatoes tasted far better than the waxy supermarket variety, they looked a bit scrawny and didn’t produce very much.

The second gardener bought the best seeds in the best seed catalog and picked out a nice patch of dirt behind his house with good sunlight. Since tomatoes are the gateway drug of home gardening, he couldn’t help but purchase a few pepper plants and eggplants too.

Because there was a lot of clay in their area he rented a roto-tiller and spent a day plowing up the hard dirt for his garden bed. The tiller violently ripped into the hard soil about a foot deep, churning everything over and deeply cultivating the topsoil and clay into a soft new mixture. Then he went to the local compost facility where grass clippings, pulled weeds, and other yard waste from all over the city was allowed to rot and decay into smelly black piles of rich organic matter. He filled his truck bed to the brim with this living-dead dirt and shoveled it onto his freshly-tilled planter beds. To this he added earthworm castings (worm poop!). He then folded all this deep into the soil turning it over and over again one shovel-full at a time.

Then he added organic fertilizer, made from decomposed bone, kelp, and fish meal. He sprinkled the ashy white powder all over the planter beds and raked it into the dirt, shaping the beds into gently sloping mounds, which were now smelly, soft, and a deep dark brown color. Into this graveyard of decomposed animal and vegetable waste he planted and watered his seeds, and reflected on how they would have to break open and “die” in order for life to spring from them. And he thought, too, of how the young plants would be – in a sense – eating the flesh and drinking the blood of all the animals and plants that were sacrificed and given on their behalf, and he marveled at how much death was required to produce rich, full life.

That summer his tomatoes outgrew their cages, and the pepper plants were so full they crowded each other in the beds. He picked so many big, beautiful tomatoes and peppers that he had to share them with his friends and neighbors since it was more than he could possible eat all by himself. And his tomatoes were very tasty.

Technorati Tags: Easter, Gardening, Jesus Christ, John, Parables

What Are Your Favorite Urban Gardening Resources?

In August of 2008 we moved into our current house, a rental, here in Oceanside. It’s an old, 60′s era, ranch rambler, completely outdated and run down, and totally energy inefficient.

We love it.

It also sits on half an acre, wedged in a unique little crevice of our neighborhood. There are 5 avocado trees, three apricot trees, and lemon tree, and an orange tree, so last summer we were swimming in fruit. Jenell was inspired by the space, so she planted a very small vegetable garden outside our kitchen door – a few tomato plants, peppers plants, some herbs, and an eggplant. We enjoyed wonderful homemade salsa all summer long. (Jenell also had a pretty decent shared garden in Ohio we enjoyed for two seasons).

This year we’ve decided to get more serious.

Our hope is to develop a genuine food producing garden in our backyard, one that we can possibly share with our church and our neighbors. I’ve carved out a section of the expansive backyard about 50 feet by 15 feet and our plan is to grow greens, sweet potatoes, carrots, tomatoes, peppers, beans, onions, leeks, etc. We’ve checked out a half a dozen books from the library on backyard food production, and I’ve been on the internets (of course), but, frankly, the information is overwhelming.

So.

If you garden, what are your favorite sources? Books, websites, whatever. Send us your recommendations please…we need the help!

Technorati Tags: Books, Gardening, Websites