A Little Manure Will Help Us Grow
No one ever wants to rejoice when going through the bad parts of life, but the truth of the matter is, these challenging times are absolute necessities in growth. The very same principal is evident in gardening. Manure, as foul and gross as it may be, does wonders for the soil and will help produce a beautiful garden. When dealing with the “poopie” times of life, we must try and remember how beautiful and fruitful our future will be!

You Need the Right Tools to Succeed
On a whim I decided to start a garden by buying all the vegetable plants at the garden center that excited me, because, of coarse– that is the fun part! I neglected to take season, space, and care into consideration only to return home and realize I didn’t own a shovel, or any of the tools needed to get started. In the garden of life, you must have the correct tools to succeed! Without the right tools, success is much more difficult, takes longer, and you are apt to throw your hands up in defeat before even starting.

The Garden Reflects the Garden Keeper
Gardens are a great reflection of ourselves as people. The more time and care we put into our garden, the more successful it will be. Likewise, in life we are only as successful, happy, fulfilled, and fruitful as we chose to be. We are in fact, the only ones that can water our own souls and pull our own weeds!

Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff
Every garden has a pest; be it gophers, caterpillars, beetles, or a pesky neighborhood dog that likes to “fertilize” the fruits of your labor. Its nearly impossible to have a garden without a few of these pests invading your space. They can cause us a lot of stress, and we can go to extreme lengths to get rid of them. But pests are simply a part of life, in gardens and in our day to day activities. I’ve learned to handle them the same way I handled my caterpillar problem, pluck them off and move on! Spending extra time on pests just takes away the time we could be spending doing more enjoyable things.

Stop and Smell the Roses
Life is made up of a series of moments, that pass just as quickly as they arrive. Before we know it, these moments have snowballed into minutes, and minutes into hours, and hours into days. And one day– we realize years have passed and we just don’t know how it crept up on us so quickly! Gardening helps us slow things down, and relish in our quiet moments. It reminds us that its okay to stop and smell the roses! We all have a hundred things we want to accomplish in a day, but more often than not, the things we should devote our energy to didn’t even make our to do list. We should spend more time with the important people in our lives, our families, spouses, friends and loved ones. We should make every moment count so that our lives are sweet as roses!