Woolsey Life

Tonight we had a heavy staff meeting (the force of gravity has increased here in the future) and we called it around 8pm and decided to hang out on the patio. As you are well aware, the yard is on the home stretch and looks complete at a glance. Jeff, Vince, Micah and Brent were standing on the walkway in the yard and looking at the grass and had observed the handfull of weeds that have developed in one are of the lawn. Vince commented that if he were I he would be pretty mad. I told them that the reasons the weeds got a foothold was because the grass there wasn’t very thick and full yet. Vince asked if I was going to get on my hands and knees and pull out every weed by hand. I explained to him that I would have to do that for now but my goal is to not go on hand weeding. I explained that the best way to prevent weeds is to do the things that strengthen the grass because the grass will choke out the weeds when it it thickens and grows deep roots. We all looked at each other and remarked that there is a Sunday message in that comment.

Once again, God demonstrates how he has every intention of speaking to me about ministry and my own spiritual life through my growing passion as a gardener.

I promise, I do think about other thing other than my yard and have in fact been thinking about something I should be doing with this blog in light of the new baby that is on its way.  That being said, the reason I keep writing about my yard isn’t because I want to bore you, but because I have become very involved.  Do you know that I have taken to spending my daytime office work at the patio table outside so that I can be closer to the lawn!?  I wonder if it will be like that when the baby is here, setting up a computer in his/her room so I can be close…  I digress.  Take a look at these pictures.  In the last couple of days the lawn has really greened up.  I decided to put a gallery up instead of just one picture because there is a ton of life out back, and I thought I would share some of it with you.  Not only will I be holding Boccie tournaments out there but I think a movie night out there might be in order with the neighbors.

[Show as slideshow]

Ok, I promise next time I won’t even mention my yard.

I know that all I talk about now is the garden and lawn, but its right there for me to see every day.  I can’t help but talk about it.

After a lot of sweating over whether or not this lawn was going to take off or not I am starting to become convinced.  I am closing in on 2 weeks after seeding (Wednesday makes 2 weeks) and everything I am told and reading says that 3 weeks is the amount of time that you need to give a lawn to start to really show up.  I am starting to think about the first mowing.  I know I need to put more seed down and I think that won’t effect the rest of the lawn.  Although, I should have put more seed down over a week ago I just haven’t had time.

It seems lately that my blog is more about my yard than anything else.  I don’t just sit and stare at it all the time and thing about nothing else, its just a great release for me and its something for me to be excited about and enjoy.  Not to mention, God is constantly talking to me through my garden and yard.  He shows me that how I care for the parts of my garden can work its way up to how I do ministry.  He also shows me the ways that my life is like that garden and he is the Gardener (ok, old cliche).  All that being said, this is definitely the year of the yard.  We knew it would be and we were prepared to spend our ‘allowance’ on it.  I guess you could say its a major kind of nesting for me as well, this is ALSO the year of the baby!

After all that, the purpose of this post is to tell you that I have found ripe fruit on my apricot tree!  I was under the assumption that it was a ‘fruitless’ tree because I had never seen fruit from it and neither had the people we bought it from.  But the neighbor told me last year that about 9 years ago there was fruit.  What happened this year?  Not only was it a wonderfully wet winter but I did some trimming on the tree while it was dormant.  I learned that I needed to do more but watch out, next fall that this is getting buzzed and I will probably have more apricots than I will know what to do with.

Can you see the green on that lawn yet?  I sure can.  This is another webcam shot from my patio table.  Its refreshing to see green on the lawn again.  For way too long I have been gazing upon death and destruction.  Finally after lots of work and lots of study and just plain sweating I can see how its going to be.
You can see here that the color is starting to bring the garden to life.  The garden has always done well but without a good grass bed to frame it the garden was just left falling short.
Finally the shades of green help to set off the daisies on the East garden.

I am getting pretty excited.  I can envision the boccie ball game soon!