This is from the spring -

Good Morning Friends! It is cloudy and cold and I have herb seeds. What am I going to do with myself? LOL This was my last bit of gardening in 2005. I planted strawberries all along the driveway wall in 2004. After my mom in law died and we had to move, the strawberries were pulled up and I just cried. My grand daughter and I had planted them together. So this morning, I was going over my old journal and found this... thought I'd share. Bright blessings... ~Amber

I get the gardening bug early...especially when it comes up for
conversation as it did in another group! actually, I never loose it.
I am renting a rototiller this spring and will make a spot for my garden. I will
garden the way I learned from my grandmother. My grandmother worked
circles around all others in the garden and never laughed at
anyone's efforts. She just had you take your shoes off. If you
didn't hurt your feet walking in the rows, the ground was worked
enough. Her answer to everything was take your shoes off. Whether
she knew it or not in every instance, I know it was her anigatogewi
connection to the earth mother. As she got older she got excited
about the Ruth Stout gardening method. She would send me articles
from prevention magazine in the mail so we could be sure to have
something to talk about when we called each other once a week. We
always shared our coffee at 5 am...before my babies got up.
Gardening brings me close to her and I can't say I miss her like
other people miss those they have lost, because I never lost her.
She is so much a part of me...but she died in 1985. It will be 22
yrs this May. I think I love her more today than I did back then and
what she taught me certainly means more. So many of the things I
know how to do came from her...cooking, sewing, gardening, keeping a
clean house...she was my good example. I think she is on my mind
today because I ordered my seeds. She was a pistol though. She
didn't take gisi off anyone. She was loyal, fun, responsible, and
made few allowances for shortcomings in people unless she knew you
really were trying and things were going wrong for reasons you
couldn't control. Those were lessons...bad choices were senseless
stupidity and she would not stick her neck into business like that.
I guess you love AROUND self caused problems. In her garden, even
that applied. There were weeds she would pull. She kept a roll of
plastic, like black trash bag material, and when her plants came up,
she unrolled that plastic between the rows in her garden, blocking
out the weeds, used a soaker hose along the base of the vegetables,
mulched with hay, and left the weeds that grew between her
vegetables to shade her plants. Her garden was special and her work
important. She gave her time to what she loved. She was a small
woman...5'3". She was a beautician when she worked. She took care of
everything she owned like it was precious. She was a young girl
during the depression, her mother died when she was 6. Her father
left her with his mother and moved out of state with his new wife
when gramma was 9. Her gramma died the same year and no one knew
where her dad was. Because it was the depression, she hired out as
household help when she was 10 yrs old and never lived with family
again until her older brother took her in when she was 18. She
married soon after that. I look back over things sometimes...and I
measure what I know today against the example my gramma set. I
wonder what it would have been like to know her Cherokee mother. I
wonder what gramma would have been like had she known her... and
every day I thank my greatgrandfather who married the Cherokee woman
for loving family history enough to keep his promise and pass her
clan on to me. I get real tired of the emails that circulate the
Internet that are suppossed to be from Cherokee Indians who
say "don't tell me about your Cherokee great grandmother". The
last was called sandpaper. If you see it in another email group,
remember this email instead...I am Cherokee. I don't care what
anyone thinks. One eighth blood passed to me from the finest woman I
ever knew. one quarter Cherokee from my father's mother, and some
Potawatomie from her father. Genealogy is an interesting thing.
Whether blood is ever revealed to you, remember what you can from
your family. We all have much to be proud of. The family stories are
worth much more than Internet trash.

As a final thought, I leave you with this ...Tend your garden. whether plants or people.

What you love, you will spend time with.