I recently happened upon a post I published to another blog a few years ago, when our earth-sheltered house was in the process of being built. I began by talking about how, before we’d moved to our rural property, I’d believed so strongly that God had called us to be off-grid with water. Then I talked about how there was no way we’d be able to water the planned forty fruit trees, vines, and bushes during a summer drought with the 3,000 gallons of water we then had stored in water storage tanks.
I was already worrying about how we were ever going to have enough water for the twenty-six fruit varieties we’d already planted. I was beginning to see that during a several-month drought, we’d barely have enough for household use. And then, there was the garden!
Did you catch that word, worry? That’s your first hint that I’d stepped out of God’s will.
We’d had to hook up to the water grid in order to properly bury our house, and when I wrote that post, I’d been feeling the freedom of having unlimited water. Had decided that I’d missed God about being off the water grid.
Fast forward to now, 2021. Of those initial twenty-six fruit plants, four trees and eight bushes, plus several blackberry and raspberry plants each, are the only survivors. And the blueberries look like they’ve been overtaken by the mummy disease that has afflicted them more and more during the past four years, and will have to go bye-bye sometime this year.
We live in highly humid climate with typically mild winters, which means that every plant that’s susceptible to any kind of fungal disease is going to get at least one of them within its first couple of years of life.
I had no idea, entering our third year here, that within three years I’d be eating the prideful words I’d written in that blog post.
We got off the water grid not too long after we finished out and moved into the earth-sheltered house. We bought, three or four years apart, two more water storage tanks, each 2500 gallons. This was enough to help us make it through a long-ish drought, both for the vegetable garden and for household needs.
There’s also the fifteen-foot diameter pool J dug and lined with pond liner. It’s about two feet deep in the middle, and is the water J uses to water trees when the hot weather hits and the rain stops. It’s never been more than half empty. Even before we took out three-fourths of our trees, vines and bushes.
Most fruit trees just don’t work in the climate where we live, unless you begin hitting them with fungicide from the get-go, which we didn’t. Not to mention the fact we don’t want to use conventional fungicides, which are much more effective than the natural ones. Especially once the plants are already diseased.
In the book of James in the New Testament, the man wrote, “Come now, you who say, ‘Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a city, spend a year there, buy and sell, and make a profit.’ Whereas you do not know what will happen tomorrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapor that appears for a little time and then vanishes away. Instead you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we shall live and do this or that. But now you boast in your arrogance….’ [James 4:13-16, NKJV]”.
I’d been subtly bragging in that post, thinking we were one day going to be self-sufficient in fruit.
Nope. Not be a long shot.
Serves me right for bragging. And planning without the Lord’s input.
Vegetables and herbs are our focus now, the latter requiring only a little supplemental water once established.
Ah, the wisdom of experience. I hope mine has just saved you a few hundred dollars in purchasing dozens of trees for your homestead on impulse, instead of growing slowly and seeing what will work.
Which is what J wanted to do in the first place.
All that frustration, when God had given me His wisdom in the form of a husband.
I must get out of the habit of being unable to learn unless I fall flat on my back.
