“While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, day and night shall not cease.” (Genesis 8:22)
Going along with the word of “turbulence” for the year, I feel a great encouragement from the Lord to still “consider it all joy”. I’ve started defaulting lately to the phrase, “find the treasure in the trial.” It occurred to me that even in the challenging and tumultuous circumstances that keep coming up day after day, I still have countless opportunity to make a choice that has great impact on the future. My future, my family’s future, future generations, and even into eternity. I could sit and whine and complain about the turbulence, or I could look for places to sow a seed for something better to take root in the place where I currently am.
I remember a time when I was young when my dad decided to replace our front lawn. I watched him use this machine called a rototiller. That thing sent blades deep into the ground and churned it up taking a dense, solid foundation and making it soft and maliable.
A rototiller has turning blades used to break up and loosen the soil, preparing the ground for a new garden. It pulls up existing weeds, roots, and grass but can also be used to mix nutrients of cover crops into the soil. Think of the disruption to the earth. Taking a foundation that is compacted and breaking it apart. This tearing and churning of the earth loosen the soil so that two things can happen. 1 – nutrients can be added to the soil through compost and the like. 2 – something can be planted in the soil. Without this breaking up of the solid ground, the soil could never receive the nutrients or the seed.
Rototilling accomplishes more than just the loosening of the soil. Tilling “green manure” crops (such as alfalfa) under the soil can help to restore nutrients like nitrogen to your garden.
- Pull up nutrient-rich soil from below the surface, so that it is available for shallow-rooted plants.
- Remove matted roots, such as those left over from a previous gardening season or from weeds that were cut off above ground.
