Author: Edward Guenther
Written: January 15th, 2014

Aunt Rebekah loved to grow things.  She would pick out where she wanted to put her garden then with the shovel work the garden soil.  Digging into the ground she would lift up the dirt and then flip it over. Doing this would help mulch the leaves in and make the soil loose so that the tiny roots could easily move through the dirt.  With her tiny hands she would break up clumps of dirt. In this manner she would move over her entire garden patch, getting it ready for planting.

 
And then would come the moment for putting the seeds into the ground.  Making a hole in the lose soil with her finger Aunt Rebekah would place a tiny seed into that hole and then cover it back up with dirt.  Sometimes she’d sprinkle seeds over a whole area if they were too tiny to individually put into a single hole.  When that happened she’d brush the ground with her hand to get dirt over those tiny seeds.  And then again, sometimes the seeds would be very large, these were called bulbs.  These she would just press into the ground, sometimes allowing the top of the bulb to remain exposed.  One of her favorite things to grow was garlic.  Garlic was a bulb.

She would watch as the bulbs put on shoots and then, as the shoots grew toward the sky,  she knew that under the ground the bulb was getting bigger and multiplying.  Every week she would water her treasures and keep weeds from growing.  If weeds grew, they would take nutrients from her garlic.  She kept a yearly garlic patch under the ash tree near the strawberry patch.

 
Each year when it was time to be harvested Rebekah would first press over the tops and wait until the tops would die.  Then the time would come to pull up the garlic, discovering how big that little bulb had become.  It would now be washed, dried and then taken into the house to be used in the kitchen.  But before she took them to the kitchen she would first take out the biggest and best cloves to set them aside for next year’s planting.
Now Aunt Rebekah lives on the farm.  Does that surprise you?  She has her very own garden now.  Do you suppose she has a garlic patch?  Of course she does and the garlic she grows is from the cloves passed down from year to year from her original patch!

The Garden (Rebekah age 6)
God, you are the greatest!
You can do everything!
You can make
Yummy things.