There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under the heavens: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot, (Ecclesiastes 3:1-2)
As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease. (Genesis 8:22)
As a city
girl in an area where technology is king and farms are something one finds “out
there, somewhere,” I’ve been slowly disillusioning myself about seedtime and
harvest. It’s taken a lifetime to reach where I am, and I have much to learn.
For years
we were taught, you don’t plant until
Memorial Day. Seedtime for everything was the same time. Then, I learned that
if you lived where my aunts and uncles did, that seedtime was a week or two
earlier. Of course, that made sense, they were south of us. But what about the
Memorial Day rule? I’m working it through my brain that the calendar doesn’t dictate planting. It’s temperature. The point isn’t that it’s the end of May; it’s that temperatures are consistently above 50. It just so happens that above
50 tends to begin around the end of May.
But even
that isn’t the whole story, because there are things that prefer cooler
temperatures. I don’t know the temperature rule for them, but they need to be
planted before “above 50.”
At the other
end, I had a little better knowledge, because seed packets clearly state that
the plants mature in a certain number of days, and it’s not always the same
number. Festivals in the area made it clear that strawberry harvest and apple
harvest aren’t at the same time, and I’m sure farmers are thankful for that.
Imagine having to bring in five or six different harvests all in a week! Sure,
they could hire more workers, or plant fewer kinds of crops, but if the one crop
you plant fails that year, you’re in trouble.
As I am
trying to learn to be more self-sufficient. I’m trying to build a habit of noting
when different harvests begin and end. For example, as of June 1, the spring Dandelion
and wild Violet harvests are over. The Borage harvest began about a week ago, and I do no know how long it will continue. Red and White Clover are getting
going.
When
considered with Scripture, this tells me that God is a God of order,
who has promised that certain things will continue in their cycle for as long
as we and the universe exist. But He doesn’t promise that they will all be the
same except in the sense that harvest will follow seedtime. The harvest
you think you’re getting to one sowing may be from another that you forgot about. That’s a little frightening
and exciting, because seeds planted when you were two, or ten, or twenty may just
be coming ready to harvest along with seeds you sowed yesterday. Plants you put
in “for the birds” may provide berries for you, and chipmunks may give you corn
or sunflowers in your garden in places you never put them.
The important
thing is that seeds will produce a harvest. It may not be what you wanted, when
or how you wanted it, but it will produce a harvest.
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