I will continue to add you in my daily prayers ma’am. I have spent some time starting at the beginning of the thread and seeing what I could glean from it. I do have limited time as I am trying to keep up with beginning this year’s garden. I have read about your physical and other needs and they have my prayer attention.
Like you, I was given a wake-up call many years ago as to what it’s like to have to do without. I have been poor and I have been comfortable but the lessons learned while poor are more valuable than a great paycheck.
Right now, the one thing I have to mention here is that a good garden starts with good soil. Compost is wonderful stuff. My own personal composting secret is that I go to the small local grocery store at appointed times and pick up their produce waste. I bring it home, process a bit and put it in my compost piles mixed with whatever leaves, hay, and other things I come across.
It’s an old adage that compost is “gold” to us gardeners. I find that purchased compost is very lacking and a waste of needed money. The compost I make is far superior and FREE! For many years I had trouble getting enough of my own made. And I have never had space for livestock so don’t have a supply of manure. With my “grocery store” secret, I have far more than I need and also barter a bit with another gardener friend using my compost as my “payment.”
We won’t always have the luxury of even that kind of supply of compost. But, when it’s there and free for the taking it’s almost a sin, to me, not to get all I can.
Like you, I was given a wake-up call many years ago as to what it’s like to have to do without. I have been poor and I have been comfortable but the lessons learned while poor are more valuable than a great paycheck.<<<
Yes, poor is valuable training for the rest of our lives.
Thank you for your prayers, they can be used and will be.
Your grocery store trips make me smile, as when Mary and I went to Yuma once a month for our shopping needs, our last stop was for the boxes of vegetable scraps at Safeway, for the Chickens, goats, etc.
We did share with them, but first, we went through the boxes for usable items. We rarely bought celery, as they toss it at the first sign of age and the animals got the outer stalks the rest went in the freezer.
Within a day or so, we would have a fine meal of the goodies.
Yes, it helped the budget, but it also gave us a goal of using something that was going to be wasted.
It is more fun to find something usable, [to me], than going shopping.
I envy you your compost, it does not do well here, but in the past, I found where a stable dumped the cleanings from the stables and would go and get the old for the garden.
LOL, they have covered about an acre with it, all nicely dumped in piles.
You are right about starting with a good soil, the natural soil here will grow a pea plant about 6 inches tall, which might have one pod on it, with one pea in it.
What a shock, my first garden was.
The compost does not stay in the soil here, as the wind blows it away.