why i want to be a weed

This evening I decided to dig some weeds out of our vegie patch. Apart from childhood gardens that someone else took responsibility for, Frank and I have never had a vegetable garden, so this is one big experiment.

We've put in some tomatoes, zucchini, cucumber, beetroot, carrots, lettuce and leek. If this seems like a rather random selection - it is. We wandered around the nursery and I selected containers from here and there until Frank advised me that no more vegetables would fit in the patch and I had to stop.

We took a rather lazy approach to planting, and didn't separate out the seedlings enough because we were trying to plant everything before it got dark and the patch is rather small so space was at a premium. So the three or four root vegetables in each hole will shortly be fighting each other for survival.

I'm loving watching everything grow, and feel a bit like a child - it won't damage the carrots and beetroot too much if I pull them out to see how they're growing will it?! Happily the tomatoes have flowers, the leeks are fattening up and the zucchini are sprouting numerous leaves, all providing enough visible progress to just about keep me from pulling up a carrot or two!

After our rather lax planting process, we've been taking good care of the little plants - shooing away sparrows that insist on pecking at the beetroot leaves (they are no longer in my good books!), daily watering and today, even weeding!

As I pulled the pesky little greenery out of the ground I got to thinking. Jesus talked about plants growing and being choked out by weeds - they were definitely the baddies in that story. But as I pulled and chucked the weeds, I decided that they weren't so bad after all and being a weed mightn't be so bad!

Think about it a little - where haven't you seen a weed growing? Exactly! Weeds flourish in any environment and under any circumstance. Admirable quality, is it not? Too often I feel crushed by life and every small knock. Other times I falter because I don't get what I want when I want it - 'life's too hard' I moan as I sink into a state of malaise and despair.

How about this? Weeds slurp all the goodness and water out of the earth and grow strong and fast. I have so much goodness around me that I often ignore! I focus on what I don't have. Or even worse, I choose to feast on unhealthy matter. Would that I might be like a weed, recognising substance, drinking it in with gusto and growing all the way.

I have to admit that my admiration for weeds ends about here! They have shallow root systems, once they're ripped up they are quickly replaced by another (I'd like to think I'm irreplacable!), and did I say they're ripped up? I could do without that!

These things aside, weeds do have some worthy qualities that I might pursue in the days ahead. Meanwhile I'll be pulling up every weed I find - they may provide excellent life lessons, but they don't do my vegies much good!

Addit: I've been trying to comment on a few people's blogs, but beta blogger won't accept anything I write. They're either very bad comments or beta blogger is not better and is having problems. Sorry guys!