We got quite a few family home evenings out of our little garden.
Heavenly Father gave us the earth.
Heavenly Father created the plants.
Heavenly Father wants us to be good stewards over what he has given us.
We need to work together as a family.
Heavenly father wants us to be self sufficient.
You get the idea.
For a long time I thought that those first little tomato seeds were dead. That nothing was going to happen with them. But finally they started to grow, and grow, and grow, and grow....until it grew into THIS!
It was actually bigger then this later on. This is about medium size.
Once it started growing it didn't produce tomatoes at first and just as I was about to give up on it for that and pull it out then the tomatoes started, and BOY did we have tomatoes. And I never had to buy tomatoes ever and we ate them almost every day. It was a constant cycle this with this plant, always some in bloom, always some turning red. It was perfect.
And then winter came, and we though we were at the end of our tomato plant, because as I'm sure you know, tomatoes only last once year. But not this one, it made it through and continued to produce tomatoes all winter. We did cover it on freezing nights and I am sure that's why it made it.
We had another year of constant tomatoes. The second year the tomatoes got smaller, but there were more of them, so what was lost in size was made up for in quantity. They were also very good tomatoes, better then what you find at the store, but I think that's true of all food you grow yourself, it just tastes better.
And then, the second winter...this one did not have such a happy outcome for the tomato plant. We had too many hard freezes, and in hindsight maybe if we had cut it down from it's vine stand maybe being lower to the ground we would have been able to keep it warm enough to live. Husband actually considered putting out electric blanket on it, but we didn't sadly. I just didn't survive.
It was a sad day when I had to pull out it's dead vines from the ground. I thought about all the lovely tomato dishes I had from it. I was grateful for what I had been able to teach my children from that plant I was grateful for the money I'd saved. I was grateful for the commandments I'd been able to fulfill by growing it.
When I had cut down all the dead vines and I got down to the bottom and was at digging out the roots of the plant I realized something. All that was just one plant. I had assumed that it was several of the six seeds we had planted in that spot that had grown up together, but when I dug up the roots everything went back to one plant, everything else was offshoots connected back to that same one plant.
There are several great Gospel lessons in that I think. Take your pick which one you need today.
For me, what really stuck out to me that day is that we can have all these things happen in our lives all these events and blessings, all these delicious tomatoes, or even the rotten ones that we have to prune off and get rid of to grow well, and we think these things come from our friends or from our family or from life, but the real source of it all, the real person who's giving us all of this, all these opportunity's and blessings is our Heavenly Father. It all comes back to him if we will just take the time to see it.
I hope someone will have a eulogy like that for me when I die, that I helped them see that all thing lead back to Heavenly Father.
So, what eulogy or Gospel lesson do have for/take from the Tomato Plant?
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