 |
| Carrots in love! |
Take, for instance, gardening and carrots. A "proper" gardener plants carrot seed in a row, then diligently thins the seedlings, ensuring that the carrots left have the proper space to grow long and straight. I, on the other hand, start out with good intentions and fairly straight rows, but then get waylaid by other things. So, some carrots get thinned; others, not so much!
This fall, again because I'm a procrastinator, I decided to mulch the carrots with a thick layer of straw instead of "having" to pull them all and process/use them. Enter, Patches, our number-one dog. When fed leftover stews or soups, she always ignores the carrots, pushing them off to one side, or sometimes completely out, of her bowl. There must be something enticing about carrots growing in the ground, though, because, every few days, she started pulling one out and eating it (or at least mauling it!).
Don saw bite marks on the top of a carrot in the bed and pulled it out to save it from a dog attack. This picture shows what came up...not one carrot, but two...two carrots, obviously in love! (Hmm...might we have had baby carrots in the spring if we had left them in the ground?) If we gently pull near their tips, they come apart, like a vegetable puzzle. Laid side-by-side, they are nearly identical, but look twisted and odd apart. Like all true lovers, they seem most complete when fitted together.
The point is, had I been a more proper gardener, this wouldn't have happened. I would have had one straight carrot; the other having been sacrificed in a thinning frenzy.I would have pulled the surviving carrot and used it in a stew, or soup, or on top of a salad, without giving it a second thought. The miracle of growing something from seed would have still existed, but not the magic of what could be!
It's a reminder that Mother Nature works in us, through us and, most magically, beyond us!
