I peered down at the pair scrabbling about on their knees in our raspberry patch, hacking at the stalks. Without mercy, or so it seemed.
When we had first considered buying our home four years prior, the raspberry patch had topped my list of “favourite things about the place.” To my delight, it grew an abundance of sweet ruby fruit every summer. But by the fifth summer it slacked off. I suspected I should be doing something about it, but didn’t know what.
I asked a pair of experts. My friend Glenda and her husband, Lornen grow the most splendid garden I’ve ever seen. They came over, wearing gloves and bearing clippers. Kneeling down, they began using them. Old canes soon littered the lawn.
“Really? We have to do that?” I asked.
“Yep,” said Lornen. “Raspberry canes need space. Thin the whole patch down to single stalks about a foot apart. Choose the weakest ones, and get rid of them. Then go over what’s left and clip the top five or six inches off each one”
Friend Glenda noticed my worry lines, I suppose. “They don’t produce anything up there anyway, Kathleen. This way the plant can put its energy into growing berries instead of leaves.”
Remembering the lush greenery of the years before, I winced. But I trusted our friends, and pitched in with the hacking and topping. That summer, the patch filled out, and just as our friends said it would, produced more raspberries than I could pick.
Another friend, Christian speaker and blogger Delores Moskul, talks about the year she decided to expand her raspberry patch – by twelve hundred raspberries plants.
That stellar idea popped into her brain the day she read the scripture, “You did not choose me; I chose and appointed you to go and bear much fruit, the kind of fruit that endures.”
A vision struck: a biblically inspired raspberry patch. Bound to succeed, she imagined. So she planted twelve rows and named each for one of the twelve apostles. She planted black raspberries in Judas’s row.
Everything looked fine at first – until the flood. “I think a better idea would have been to build an ark for the raspberries,” she chuckles. “Not all the plants survived.” But she learned something valuable. “Just because I thought I was following God’s plan, doesn’t necessarily mean I was. Rather than have me manage a HUGE raspberry patch, he down-sized my patch ON purpose.”
God soon showed Delores exactly what kind of fruit God has chosen her to grow. Today she plants seeds of faith into the lives of others, helping them grow deeper in their faith.
Whether we want to grow good fruit or a right life, God, the expert at growing things, always knows best. Just like my friends.
Year by year, Delores’s yield is multiplying. So are my raspberries. This year I even thinned them myself, without complaining.
