the seed

You know  that feeling when it’s mid winter, and you are craving a garden fresh cucumber? You get all excited and look out the frosted window towards the spot where your garden is, or will be come spring, and then get slapped in the face with reality. You don’t have any cucumbers growing, because it’s winter. All you have out there is a lumpy yard of dirty snow. Yeah, I hate that feeling. Over the next few weeks, I almost always obsess over designing the PERFECT garden. I create pinterest boards, go on crazy internet searches of what grows best next to tomatoes. Oh, and the stack of graph-paper garden sketches begin to fill my recycle bin. This cycle consumes me every year. I’m pretty sure that sometime between the end of football season (Go Broncos!) and mid-March my husband starts to tune me out. I know I would. I’m not sure how many times a person can answer the questions, “how do you feel about kale? radishes? arugula?”

Then it all becomes real. Seeds.Those little packets begin popping up everywhere. They draw me in like a tractor beam. I stand hypnotized by the 47 varieties of tomatoes and the plethora of peas: Snap Peas, Snow Peas, Sweet Peas, English Peas, PEAS, PEAS, PEAS! I want them all, I NEED to grow them ALL. Here is the crazy thing… I don’t even EAT tomatoes OR peas! But that doesn’t matter… I start to hoard those little packets, and then the revisions of the soon-to-be garden begin. More graph-paper garden sketches, but this time they are labeled with the names from those little packets, and I have broken out the measuring tape.

Seeds. It all starts with a seed, doesn’t it? The idea is one thing, but once the seed is available, that idea becomes real, tangible. And then when the time is right, we plant it, water it, give it sunshine and speak kind words to it, and eventually it’ll grow into something perfect or perfect-ish, hopefully. When I hold those tiny seeds in my hand, I have hope. Hope that someday soon I will be able to see all that hard work and planning produce something beautiful.

A seed can be as simple as an idea. When an idea is planted, we feed it with time, energy, hope, prayer, and love. Sometimes a seed is a dud, especially if we don’t feed it enough, or as often as we should. But what about when it blossoms?

When I met my husband, my outlook on the future changed more than I expected. I have lived within a 2 mile radius of a Target my entire life, on purpose. The mere thought of gardening for anything more than pleasure was lost on me. But then the husband came. He grew up far from the city, where dirt roads were a real thing and not just an inconvenience that chipped the paint off your car while camping. Yeah, I was THAT princess.  We have been together for 5 years, and in that time, I have adopted a completely new outlook on life.

We planted a seed, or verbalized a dream together awhile back. An idea that someday we would leave the city, build a house, raise our children alongside farm animals and a year-round garden, and teach our kids  that food doesn’t just come from the grocery store.  After this, he spent hours online looking at houses, and stacks of graph-paper sketches of our dream house filled the recycle bin. Finally, after months of planning and prayer, we bit the bullet.  The Askew Family is leaving the city. Our seed has sprouted!

Watch this video…  Perfectly Askew Life Property Video  (Please ignore the apostrophe that snuck in. Punctuation. Ugh.)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go eat my last garden-grown cucumber…