Summertime. Gardening. Sunny days. I love this time of year in the Pacific Northwest. Plants that have been dormant all winter respond to the long, hot days of summer and begin to reveal beautiful flowers and fruit.

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My garden is a hodgepodge of plants that I’ve been gifted or that I’ve transplanted from one area of my yard to another. It has many raised beds that my husband built because the hillside is so darned rocky. I also have several types of herbs and berries to make myself feel successful at gardening – they’ll grow anywhere! I’ve been at it many years, and some seasons are bountiful…and at other times the birds and bunnies make out like bandits, and I feel like Mr. McGregor from Beatrix Potter’s Peter Rabbit, scratching my head and wondering what I could have done differently to have harvested a better crop.

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My time tending to my plants is not just about getting more. I actually enjoy being outside, getting a little sun on my skin, getting a little ache in my back from bending over to yank yet another weed. It’s during these times when I can really quiet my spirit and whisper soft prayers into the breeze.

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It’s a time when I can slow way down and reflect on my life, my health, and my friends and family…things I’m thankful for. There are no to-do lists when I’m out there. No agendas, no phones. Just me and the tasks at hand – pull that weed, bend that plant, net that bush, prune that vine, pick that fruit…. It’s a time when I can feel the lilting breeze against my sweaty skin…. Listen to the trill of that bird…. What is that crunching sound down the hill…a deer?

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Here’s an amazing thing about gardening: My work is never done. You’d think that would really bother a control freak like me. But I find it exhilarating. I like knowing that I can putter for 15 minutes or for a half day and accomplish great things or accomplish nothing at all. It’s not really about that.

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I moved to this town a dozen years ago, and the landscape was very different then. But as I settled in and made more time for planting typical intentional things like pumpkins or zucchinis, I didn’t really enjoy gardening. It overwhelmed me. The plants certainly came up, but they became big, creeping vines and overtook my hillside. Did I get a good harvest? That depends on your perspective. To me, it seemed like a big chore rather than a peaceful commune with nature. For a season, I was chasing abundance even though it brought me no joy. It was just what I thought I was supposed to do with a garden. And meanwhile, the weeds never seemed to die.

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I started to joke that if God gave me weeds, it would be no problem because I would turn them into a pie…or cobbler…or jelly! So when I changed my attitude and started to work with what I’d been given, everything changed. I began to really treasure the plants that were plentiful (such as herbs and berries). One year, my girls and I made lotion with calendula and bath salts with lavender. We made enough to share with friends and family, and it was really fun. Another year, I made so many blackberry pies that my kids begged me to stop. (Can you imagine?) Two years ago, I used herbs to make my first creative jellies (lavender-lemon balm and catmint-sage). They were delicious and people really liked them…because they were so unusual and you couldn’t just run down to Safeway to buy another jar.

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A lot of my gardening expertise has come through many seasons of trial and error. Did I put seeds in the ground too early? Did the birds eat up all the sprouted sunflowers again? Did I prune the blueberries back far enough last year to ensure that they would produce fruit this year? Often, I will not have the answers until the fruit is revealed. Many variables come into play, such as weather. This year, many plants were watered abundantly but did not receive enough light, so they were several weeks late in making an appearance. This isn’t a life-or-death situation, but it does show that we set our expectations for certain things to happen if we put the work in. And when it takes “too long,” we complain or feel disappointed.

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Sometimes, though, even when we do everything right – prune long branches, mulch in the fall, weed in the spring, and stake leggy plants – there is that result that does not come from us, and we don’t receive the gift we were expecting. We can become impatient (which does not change the outcome), or we can continue to care for and watch and weed and water and know that our reward will come later than we anticipated. Will we appreciate it less if it appears next year? No! In fact, we sometimes appreciate it more because we’ve been on a long journey with that plant. We know when we put it in the ground. We know that it came from a tiny seed or a spindly cutting, and we wait and wait.

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As parents, we often wait in other areas of our lives, too. I recently hosted a Mom’s Night Out, and many of us shared our parenting struggles. Young siblings fight or disobey. Teens don’t pitch in and help out with chores. They date the wrong people or experiment with things they shouldn’t. Our offspring are a lot like our plants. They require so much tilling of the soil. They need fresh water and sunshine. They need our help to remove the weeds from their lives. Sometimes it takes many seasons, and we have to wait it out. It’s very difficult and sometimes very painful, and that’s why moms need each other so much. A mother of teens has wisdom and advice that can help a young mother who’s just starting out.

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Our struggles, when we share them, can help another mom see that she’s not alone. We’ve certainly all cried and prayed, thought we’ve made a mess of things, and that we have most definitely ruined our children. We want to jump in and remove obstacles from our children’s lives so they can have an easier time growing up. We want to train them so that they can manage their lives without us one day. But just like we don’t want to pick unripe fruit, we can’t hurry the process. Our kids will fall, fail, and succeed, and if we can allow them to do this under our watchful eye, they will learn, grow, and one day become independent. We can put up walls of protection around them just like we put bird netting around our berry bushes, and that will keep out many causes of harm, but not all. We must be diligent in our training and in our prayers so that one day we will reap an abundant harvest and we will be blessed by many bushels of fruit and dozens of pies.