Abundance

 I never shared the pictures of my late garden, taken at the end of September.  Here are the collards, carrots, beets and nasturtiums.  The cabbages were already gone.  The trellis in back was covered with cucumbers and winter squash earlier in the season.

Here are some of the red peppers ripening.  I've got to say, I don't think I've ever tasted a pepper before.  Fresh from the garden, these were as juicy and as sweet as apples.

This is one of the thousands of morning glory blooms that sprang from one seed, planted on the edge of the tomatoes.  I figured the morning glory would climb the tomato vines and they did!  It took until late fall for them to begin to bloom, and then they were amazingly vigorous. 

This picture does not do justice to the amount of amazing tomatoes we got - both round and plum.  The green ones I picked at the end of the season are still ripening into juicy, delicious fruit on the kitchen windowsill today.

Here are just a couple of the Asian yard long beans.  They really were a yard long, and they had a firm texture and a nutty taste.  Only two or three beans were enough for a meal!  In the background is the already cleared bed that held 48 corn plants that actually yielded great silver queen corn, but we had to fight the worms for it.

The garden was more abundant than I had dreamed it would be, but not in the ways I'd imagined.  I had more cucumbers than I knew what to do with from only two plants until they mysteriously all turned soft and yellow and died.  But they were great while they lasted.  My winter squash vines took off like a shot and grew hundreds of blossoms.  In the end only two of the blossoms developed into a squash - the rest just fell off.  I had more tomatoes than I expected and frankly, I didn't expect any corn at all - but I actually had some!  It felt like a real accomplishment.  The carrots were thick and straight and beautiful, and the beets were big and round, but the cilantro died and the melon never sprouted.  I didn't get the greens I'd hoped for.  The collards, grown from young plants produced well all summer, but the kale, spinach, chard and lettuce I planted from seed really didn't grow much at all.  That was disappointing, since my main reason for wanting a garden was for greens.  But the peppers and the fresh parsely and basil made up for it.  They were much better than I could ever have imagined.

Sometimes you can fall into thinking that abundance means having it all.  But my garden this year reminded me that true abundance - the God give kind - is not the same as getting everything you want.  True abundance is in the awareness that you've been given a blessing, and it often comes in unexpected ways, and what you don't get only makes you love what you do get all the more.