Hothouse

So, a view of the hothouse, beehive of activity, place of growing things. It is really husband's place, he makes it so the plants can grow themselves, but it is a place of great comfort to me. Any day with any sunshine and it is warm in there, enough to bake the chill out of even my refrigerator cells -- that's what husband calls the various parts of me that can be colder than whatever the ambient temperature is. I remember being young and there being hothouses, glass back then, every few miles it seems, and I would be along with my mother as she stopped at every single one. I have no clue what she bought. What I remember is how the places smelled, were warm, all the plants everywhere, and how they smelled again. I loved wandering around in them.

What you see there is, in the middle bed, snap peas coming up on the middle line. Strings or something will soon be strung for them to climb on. There are also some onions for early green onions and brassicas and coles and spinach and mustard and radishes and probably some other things in there. I never know all the details of that stuff -- that is the stuff that is his. But the idea of that bed is to have us, our family, something fresh and green all year round. Under the benches on the side you can't see are old bee hive boxes that are filled with dirt (manures, peat, leaf mold, stump dirt) and also growing early stuff for us.

In the trays on the bench that you can see, and in the trays under the bench, are plants that will be set out in the garden. Cabbages, brocolli, lettuce, carrots (the carrots are a whole experiment unto themselves), peas for extra early ones (there are also some planted in the garden), all the hot weather stuff too -- tomatoes and peppers and watermelons and other melons and squash of all sorts, all sorts of greens, herbs, everything ever grown in our garden except potatoes. Some beans and corn will get a slightly later start in the hothouse for transplanting. It is really an amazing abundance of stuff.

But not only that, but an abundance of varieties! We are growing four different colors of carrots! We grow close to a dozen different types of potatoes (and have found saving our own for seed to be quite successful -- despite what the seed potato sellers will tell you). Hot peppers, sweet peppers. Eggplants of purple and white and gold I think it was. Beans I couldn't even say how many varieties we grow, but I love the purple podded ones, the McCaslins, the greasy beans -- and that's just the green bean varieties. Shell beans we grow more different kinds than we do potatoes. Well, I'm ahead of myself on some of that stuff, but we put in some of the all blue potatoes in the garden just the other day.

"Abundance is scooped from abundance yet abundance remains." Ann Sexton

And funny, in looking for the attribution of that quote, I ran into this that I wrote more than three years ago:

If I had a sermon for this time of year it would be to go forth and watch a creek. It flows and yet doesn't run dry. All GOOD things are like this. Don't create a world a false scarcity. Don't create a small pond to be the big fish in. Create abundance, the eternal stream that meets all needs, flowing freely right directly through your very life.

And then I questioned myself:
What changes would it take in your life for you to be plugged into the abundance that is there, rather than attending every moment to the scarcity that is only a imaginary construct? What different choices would you have to make?