A Windowsill And A Bit Of Concrete

You measured it once, in paving slabs.

Four. Maybe five if you count the awkward one by the bin that never gets any sun. And a windowsill, which is deep enough for two pots if they are not big pots.

That is the whole of it, and you know the exact dimensions, because at some point you stood out there and worked out how much space you actually had, and the number was small enough that you went back inside and did not do anything about it.

And when it comes up, you say you do not really have a garden.

I want to go after that sentence, because it is not a description of your circumstances. It is a decision you made about what counts, and it was made using somebody else's measurement.

Here is what I mean.

Somewhere you have a picture of what a garden is. It has ground in it. It has a lawn or at least an edge, and probably a shed, and enough of it that you walk around rather than stand in it. And measured against that, four slabs and a sill are not a small garden. They are not a garden at all. They fall off the bottom of the category entirely.

So you have not planted anything, not because you cannot, but because you decided the space was disqualified.

And I want to say this clearly and then not labor it: I am not about to tell you that your four slabs are secretly just as good as an acre. That would be nonsense and you would stop reading. Somebody with a field can grow things you cannot grow and there is no point pretending otherwise.

What I am telling you is that the category is wrong.

A garden is not a size. It is ground with something growing in it that somebody tends. That is the whole definition, and it does not have a minimum, and four slabs and a windowsill clear it without qualification.

The least of all seeds

There is a comparison Jesus makes about smallness, and the detail people skip is the one that matters here.

Another parable put he forth unto them, saying, The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed, which a man took, and sowed in his field: (Matthew 13:31, King James Version)

The kingdom of heaven is like to a grain of mustard seed.

Now that parable is usually preached as being about growth, and it is, but look at what the choice of image is doing before any growing happens.

He picks the smallest thing on the table. Deliberately. He is describing the kingdom of heaven, which is the largest subject available to anybody, and He reaches for the least impressive object in the room to do it.

And He does not apologize for the size. There is no clause where He acknowledges that a mustard seed is a bit of a comedown. He simply puts the smallest thing forward as the true picture of the largest thing, and moves on.

That is a way of handling smallness that almost nobody manages. We either inflate it, which is dishonest, or we discount it, which is what you have done with your four slabs.

He does neither. He treats the small thing as fully real, at its actual size, and it turns out that is exactly what it needed.

You are standing on ground that is fully real at the size it actually is, and it has never once needed inflating to count. Matthew 13:31 puts the least of the seeds forward without apologizing for it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person stop discounting what she has.

Constraint is not the same as poverty

Here is the practical part, and it is the thing gardeners with actual land quietly know.

A small space is a different discipline, not a lesser one.

If you have four slabs you cannot grow everything, which means you will choose, and choosing is most of the skill. You will get to know one wall better than most people know their whole plot, because you will pass it eleven times a day. You will notice within a week that the sun leaves the left hand side at two in the afternoon, and that is information a person with half an acre may never acquire about any part of it.

Everything you grow will be in a container, which means you control the soil completely rather than inheriting whatever is there. Growers with fields envy that and cannot have it.

And nothing will be far away. The reason so many gardens fail is distance: the plot is at the end of the garden or the end of a lane, and it becomes a place you have to decide to go to. Yours is on the way to the bin. You cannot forget it.

So the constraint has given you three genuine advantages, and you have been treating the whole arrangement as a deficiency because it does not look like a picture in your head.

What you have is a different discipline rather than a smaller version of one, and the constraint has never once been the same as poverty. The written word takes the least of the seeds and treats it as entirely sufficient, and the Spirit of God is the one who shows a person what her own ground is actually good for.

One growing thing, where you pass it

So here is the assignment, and where you put it is the important half.

Put one growing thing on the sill or the step where you will pass it daily.

One. Not a plan for the whole yard, not a scheme with three tiers of shelving, because that is the picture in your head coming back in a different outfit.

Anything that grows. A herb from the supermarket that would otherwise die in its plastic sleeve. Something from a seed. A cutting somebody gave you in a jam jar.

And put it in the traffic. On the sill above the sink, on the step by the back door, on the ledge you pass going out to the bin. Not the sunniest spot, if the sunniest spot is somewhere you never go. Passing it daily matters more than the light, because a thing you see is a thing you water.

Then treat that as the garden. Not as the beginning of a garden. As the garden, entire, at its actual size.

You will probably want a second one within about ten days. That is how this goes and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But start with one, in the traffic, and let it be the whole thing.

You are able to keep one growing thing where you pass it, and a garden has never once required more ground than the space you have. Matthew 13:31 puts the smallest seed forward as the picture of the largest thing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman setting a pot on a windowsill.