Hyacinths Sprouting

The hyacinth bulbs i began forcing in December are sprouting green now down in my basement. I'm bringing them up to warmth and sun in the kitchen, one by one.

What's hibernating in the basement of your heart? Some delayed dream? A spiritual path that heads off in a direction you can't quite see? A desire for peace? A yearning to rest from restlessness? A hunger for happiness?

Sit. Only sit and wait.  Don't distract yourself with busy-ness. Your authentic self will bloom when it's ready.

photo by Nancy Riege

Onion Harvest

My onion harvest is dried. Time to store them in the basement. This is the biggest bonanza of onions i've ever had: a harvest of 225. I am ready for winter.

I particularly like the looks of the Redwing onion--a deep red northern onion.

Our local taco truck offers pickled red onions as a topping, so i've been pickling my own red onions. When a pickle jar is empty, i slice red onions into the pickle juice. That way, i always have my very own pickled red onions ready to chop into any salad.

Although we like to preserve things for the future, these things age and die, just as we do.

My onions will last until spring. Then they will sprout and be ready for their next incarnation.

P.S. Send me your favorite onion recipes.

Old Potatoes

All my red potatoes have sprouted down in the basement, even though i covered them with a towel to keep them in the dark.

Planting season is 3 months away, so i won't keep them for seed potatoes--although that idea is quite enticing.

Instead, i'm cutting off the sprouts and grating up those wrinkled red skins to make hash brown potatoes. Yes, the skins are wrinkled. They look old. The potatoes are not pretty, but they still are a vegetable contributing to my well-being.

We get old and wrinkled too. We sprout hairs in unexpected places. We sprout brown spots in unwanted places. But we are still good for something.

An old person eating old potatoes. Why not?

Lemon Verbena Sprouts Indoors

In October, on a whim, i potted up the 3-foot tall lemon verbena that had been growing in the herb garden all summer. Its leaves immediately died, due to transplant shock, so i pruned the stems down to 3 inches, and waited.

Now, 2 months later, the bare stalks are sprouting new growth.

Patience is a cure-all quality, good for just about every situation.

Now that my indoors herb garden is growing, i can add lemon verbena the next time i cook chicken.

Sprouting Onions

My onion harvest this fall was disappointing--a lot of little onions. Now some of them are sprouting in the basement, despite my best efforts to dry them in the dark.

Despite the fact that half of the onions are rotten, i'm able to "harvest" the green sprouts and saute them with other veggies. Cooking with my own home-grown vegetables--even the unexpected ones like onion greens--gives me a thrill.

You can call this making lemonade out of lemons. Seeing the good--even in the rotten--and savoring those sauteed onion greens (which smell heavenly) rewires the brain and makes me happier.

Green Mulch

Out into the garden at 6 a.m., having meditated just as the birds were starting to sing their early morning symphony. Now i'm concentrating on the vegetable garden, which is chock-full of volunteers. Mustards and lambs quarters--i suppose i could call them my cover crop. I pull them up by the handfuls and lay them to rest on bare dirt where they become "green mulch"--sort of like green burial. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and earth to earth in a few short weeks.

The great cycle of life is right there in the garden, right before my very eyes--birth, life, death.

The second planting of pole beans seeds are just beginning to sprout. Such dear babies--full of hope and promise. I carefully arrange my green mulch of weeds around them to keep down the weeds. I use weeds to discourage weeds. We use the mind to spring the mind loose from its habitual patterns. Otherwise, the mind is just a weed patch.

Pull a few mind weeds today, label them, let them go, and notice what happens.

Blooming Tulips

For Valentine's Day, i gave my gardening friend Paul a pot of tulips that i had been forcing in my garage over the winter. After a month of living in the warm indoors, they are blooming.

We plant ourselves in meditation. Maybe at first, it looks like nothing is happening. But as our roots are established, as we notice the warmth of what we are doing, an insight sprouts and blooms.

That Sneaky Invasive Weed

Last summer I weeded a patch of bishop's weed (Aegopodium) out of one of my flower beds. This invasive grows from the tiniest piece of root left in the ground. Usually I cremate my bucket full of bishop's weed in my wood stove, but it was July. I set the bucket aside. I forgot about it. The bucket looked brown and dead in August. Then it was rained on and became a putrid mess. I forgot about it some more. There the bucket stayed, behind my compost pile, all winter long.

This morning, I wanted to use the bucket, so I picked it up, and little green leaves were sprouting inside the bucket. Now, I took the slightly soggy clump into the wood stove for cremation tonight. This invasive will start growing again the minute my back is turned.

When we are ready to root out the weeds of our mind, we have to be assiduous. We don't need to hate the enemy weed; that's useless, a waste of our energy, and only builds the unwholesome habit of hatred.

We keep our attention on our inner weed patch and perhaps root it out as best we can. And when it sprouts again, as it will, we renew our attention. We refocus our intention: I don't want that weed in my mind-garden, thank you very much. We want the flowers of kindness, patience, and investigation. So we practice kindness and patience toward this unwanted, unwholesome habit. Then, we are building our kindness and patience muscles.

I'll feel the burn tonight when it's chilly.