I've just finished reading a book on manifesting, mostly written for the benefit of the people who were a part of the Findhorn community in Scotland. Manifesting is the process of drawing to you either people, opportunities, or things that you need. It seems to work best when you are not anxious about the need or worried about a perceived lack of whatever it is. Often, when you proceed with confidence that you will get what you need, the universe just seems to provide it for you.
Recently for us, this took the form of apricots and cherries from friends, enabling us to make jam and pie filling, as well as eat some outright. No money changed hands; these things were provided for us because others had them and did not need them, and did not plan to use them--or they had so much in excess that they had some to spare. It's been the same with the lambs' quarters, many of which I blanched and froze and put away for winter, in lieu of the spinach we did not get this year due to last year's two fence-spraying fiascos. Gradually, things are coming to us as we need them, and I'm grateful for every leaf and every piece of fruit. While one cannot live on jam and pie filling, it's still food, and food which would otherwise have been a luxury item we would probably have had to decide not to buy this year.
Our heirloom mammoth melting snow peas are doing as well this year as they did last year even with the late start due to the mice eating the newly-planted peas. We're getting a few beans, and I'm hoping for a bumper crop even though I don't have as many bean plants as I'd hoped for. The Roma tomatoes look good, as do the Marmande and Marglobe, and while the beefsteaks are still smaller than we really need them to be, I'm hoping they give us at least one or two meals of stuffed tomatoes. Though the salad is almost gone and the spinach needs to be replanted now, the kale and collard greens are doing great, with large healthy leaves that make the memory of last year's loss seem much more distant.
The really great thing is that we started all of these plants from seed this year--even the four healthy little Rosa Bianca eggplants that I recently transplanted into one of the tall box beds. My only disappointment in planting from seed this year was that the lemon cucumbers aren't doing as well as they did last time, and the Principe Borghese seeds that I got from the wonderful free tomato seed people at Wintersown did not sprout at all, even when I replanted them. Finally, two of the Chinese eggplants they gave me made a late appearance, and now that they're big enough to survive it, I'm going to transplant them into the big box bed as well. Then I'm going to actually freeze a small bag of snow peas--very cool. We did not have enough last year to do more than eat them up as they came. Now I'm about one container ahead of what we're eating, and if it keeps on for just a little while, I should be able to get a few small bags of snow peas into the freezer.
