I am sure that many of you know I enjoy gardening. I love watching things that I plant grow and bear fruit. But there was a time when I was young that I didn’t enjoy gardening. My parents always had a big garden and as soon as I was big enough to hold a hoe, I was expected to help out in the garden. You know, when you are 10 years old there is a million things more interesting to do than working out in the garden. Gardens don’t grow in nice cool weather, they grow in hot days when the sweat runs in your eyes and drips off the tip of you nose.
But now that I have a garden of my own I am rediscovering what I should have enjoyed as a child. But my nemisis then is the same as my nemisis now; Weeds!
Crab grass, nut grass, lambsquarters, Cocklebur, and morning glories. I hate morning glories. You can weed through your garden and the morning glories sprout under your heels as you weed.

Well the only way to get ahead of weeds is to get them out by the roots. You can use your roto tiller to get the weeds out of the middle of the row but for weeds growing near the vegetables you have to hoe them out or bend over and pull them. Sometimes it’s diffcult to see the weeds under the vegetables, sometimes they are very obvious.

Weeds are like sins in our lives. They choke our spiritual life and can even cause us to die spiritually. Sometimes our sins are where everyone can see and sometimes they are secret and no one sees them accept God.

I can look at my garden and see a few weeds. Then look at my neighbors garden and see his is overgrown and I think my garden isn’t so bad you can barely see any weeds. But the weeds are still there and they are growing. This is one way sin deceives us. We become blind to sin by not taking it seriously. We judge ourselves by the worlds standard rather than the word of God.

The only way to throughly kill a weed is to pull it out by the roots. Pulling weeds is like rooting out sin; we must get to the very bottom of things in order to win.
It does no good to just pull off the top of the weed -we must dig down deep to get all the root out in order to be able to hope the offending weed is gone, never to return.

Only constant attention will see a garden through to bear fruit. In the same way we must constantly be aware of our spiritual self and it’s condition, so we can grow to maturity and bear fruit.

Are we active in the garden of the soul? Constantly maintaining it to keep sin out?

We start our garden of the soul when the words of Christ are sown in our heart and we obey those words by being baptized into Christ.

Anyway another interest that has held my mind is history. My family took few vacations when I was young but most of the places we did visit had a historical perspective. When I was seven my family went to the Shiloh battlepark in Tennessee.  Since then I have had a love of things about the American civil war.  In my paternal family only three generations have passed since the civil war. My grandmother would tell me stories of the war and reconstruction that she heard from her parents and family. One story she told was her mother, whose father was in the battle of Shiloh, said they could hear the cannon fire from the battle over 50 miles away.  In 2003 I took my family to London and opened up a whole new historical world for me and my children.  Things suddenly wasn’t a mere two hundred years old but nine hundred, a thousand , fifteen hundred years old. To stand where Thomas Becket was killed in Canterbury Cathedral was chilling. To be at Elizabeth the first’s grave on the day of her death four hundred years later was awe-inspiring because people brought flowers. I hope one day to go to Rome and Egypt to see even older things.

My interest in blacksmithing came at an early age as well. My grandfather’s old forge and anvil was in the farm work shop. My brother and I would melt lead and cast bullets and fishing weights in the forge. When I was seven I received a pocket knife for a present, that started

an interest in edged weapons and tools that flowed into blacksmithing. I still have that pocket knife after all these years, it’s been lost countless times but has always been found. A visit to a real blacksmith shop back in the eighties inspired me to pursue my hobby further. I took classes in Blacksmithing at John C. Campbell Folk School in Brasstown, North Carolina. Taking these classes really helped advance my skill level.
My interest in gardening didn’t manifest until I retired. Being a typical kid I didn’t enjoy gardening at all when I was young but when I retired and had my own garden then things blossomed for me.(pun intended) I find it very relaxing and the smell of new turned earth stimulating.   The help and encouragement of my wife has added to the pleasure of gardening. From planting the seeds til processing the harvest. I have had a lot of luck with cabbage and making sauerkraut. I have a new appreciation of my farmer father and his struggle with farm pests. Wild morning glories are a plague to mankind. And I know the value of a sharp hoe.

I’ll probably light on some interest to blog about when I find it.
Yellow Hammer

Yellow Hammer