The Good Earth of Good Friday

On this Holy Saturday I got out the buckets and the pitchfork. I poured the H20 in the composter, then stirred it throughly with the fork. I realized part way through the effort that someone else will be applying the outcome, since we are moving in a few weeks, but that didn't deter me. It was good to be reminded of gardens and growth on this largely ignored transition day between Good Friday and Easter Sunday. Holy Saturday is, for the most part, Grocery and Liquor Store Saturday, judging by the crowded parking lots around town.

I hadn't realized that in the Southern States this weekend is a traditional planting time for gardeners, something which be ill-advised in our region, even with the latest possible Easter and a changing climate. I saw an article by Stacey Smith called The Good Earth of Good Friday which I will share with you in part:

My grandfather used to always say that you should plant your garden on Good Friday. An intensely practical man, he shunned such frivolities as flowers and squash—a vegetable he regarded as inedible—but planted rows and rows of butter beans, tomatoes, peas and green beans in the dark soil of his north Georgia garden. As a little girl, my mother remembers putting on my grandmother’s high heels and going out in the backyard garden with my grandfather. She would dig the heel of her shoe into the brown dirt where my grandfather would then place a seed. As a child myself, I remember sitting with him on the porch snapping green beans before dinner. And each of those beans grew out of a seed that found its way into the ground on Good Friday.

The tradition of planting your garden on Good Friday is an old standard in the South. Some say that it grew out of the time of the potato famine when gardeners needed an extra blessing to make their crops grow. It may also be simply that Good Friday is often a day off from work and a chance to spend extra time outdoors. Many gardeners, however, view it as impractical because Good Friday moves around. Some years it’s in late March when a hard frost could destroy the seeds, and other times it falls deep into April when your garden should already be planted. Yet for my grandfather and lots of other gardeners, Good Friday is the best day of the year to plant the seeds that will produce food in the coming months.

This tradition is a way of demonstrating that in the midst of death—even death on a cross—we continue to have hope. On this day of darkness and death, we testify that the hope we have in Christ is one that will bear fruit—and vegetables. And even if those seeds of hope are buried deep in the earth, in the darkness of the soil when a hard frost can still threaten the crop, the good earth of Good Friday reminds us that death does not have the final word. Planting a garden on this day means that we trust that life is stronger than death, that light is stronger than darkness, and that the spring is stronger than the winter we are leaving behind.

I suppose we will be content with the snow drops and crocuses and scilla, anticipating a later blooming and harvest.

Thoughts?