Hello folks,
Pardon the chickens in the background,
My girls are laying.
Today's story is one of my favorites because it's true and also because there's several qualities to it that I think we could all do to master.
I went to visit my friend last year and we were out in her garden and she told me this story and I think there's a lot to it.
Several years ago now we're both farm girls and farm girls do things a little differently.
So my friend Callie was talked into getting on a dating app,
Which is not something that a lot of farm people,
Farm girls especially,
Are prepared for.
So she met this fella from the city and he was nice.
He was sweet and charming and he picked her up at eight o'clock and he brought her a book of okay,
A dozen roses and they were bright pink.
They were the most beautiful roses she had ever seen.
She looked at the tag and they were organic and spray free and fancy la-di-da.
And they had very small thorns,
But they were gorgeous.
And so she had him come inside before they left and he assumed it was to put them in a vase.
Instead of pulling out a vase though,
Callie,
Being Callie,
Pulled out a knife and a box of potatoes.
We keep our potatoes in boxes.
Most city folks keep them in bags.
It's the same thing.
But she pulled out her box of potatoes and a sharp knife and this poor city boy didn't know what to make of that.
He watched in horror as she cut every single flower head off of these roses,
Ripped them all apart,
Petal by petal,
And spread them out on a cookie sheet for some crazy reason.
And then even more insanely to him,
She cut all of the leaves off of every single one of these now dead sticks,
Cut them all in half and shoved the cut end in a potato.
You can imagine this poor boy had no idea what was going on.
And I think that was about when he realized that Callie and he were not meant to be.
And that's all right.
Now what she did from there was leave the sticks in the potatoes for a couple of weeks.
And then she put them out in pots in the yard.
And if anyone has propagated roses,
You might know this trick.
But for the folks who haven't,
This is the easiest way to grow roses from cuttings.
What happens is the potato adds moisture and nutrients and it protects these very delicate little roots from burning as they can very easily.
Rose roots are quite delicate for a while.
They need a lot of special care and a little bit of knowledge.
So the potato method works great from any cutting.
And Callie knew that,
But this poor boy didn't.
So by the time those potatoes were in pots,
The boy was gone,
But the roses were not.
In fact,
When I visited her,
We sat out in her garden and in the very middle of it,
There's a semicircle of rose bushes and they're beautiful.
They're thick with heavy trunks now.
And they stand a little taller than both of us.
I mean,
We're short,
Petite ladies,
But they both stand,
They all stand on both sides,
Taller than us.
And in the middle,
She set up a bench and it's almost like a secret garden.
You go in there and when I visited last,
Everything was blooming.
So these huge pink flowers,
I'd never seen roses look like that.
They were pink and the size of a softball,
Just stunning,
Stunning roses.
And in the brush under the bushes,
Because Callie doesn't weed whack,
There were several little baby bunnies.
And we tried to count them,
Which is a hard task because baby bunnies move quickly.
They're very good at hiding and they're all the same color.
So we thought there might be four or five in there.
Our mom left them there in the safest place she could find and she went off to do rabbit things for the day.
That's the way of rabbits.
So if you have baby bunnies somewhere,
You know this is a safe place.
And those roses smell amazing.
They're stunning and they just smell the way you would think paradise would.
So Callie is very proud of them.
And she also loves to keep potpourri around her house,
Which we pick on her for because it's kind of a granny thing to do.
But she makes all her own potpourri out of orange peels,
Lemon peels,
And rose petals.
So you see,
When her beau brought her that bouquet,
She wasn't wasting it the way he thought she was.
She wasn't destroying,
She was creating.
And really,
If you think about it,
What do we do with cut flowers?
We stick them in some water to prop them up a while.
And then when they get picky looking,
When they start wilting and look sad,
We throw them in the trash and we forget they ever were.
When you really pick that apart,
How sad,
How terribly sad these beautiful living things are no more.
They are made and produced to be disposable.
So Callie's roses relate to the rest of us as well.
Even if you're not sticking plants in potatoes,
We all do things that seem a little crazy or seem outside of cultural norm.
Or at least we all should,
In my opinion.
I think we all have roses in our lives,
We just have to learn to see them and identify them.
And then be either brave or crazy,
Like Callie,
And pull out our potatoes.
Now Callie's roses will probably live 50 to 100 years from one bouquet.
Obviously,
The relationship didn't last that long,
But now she has this beautiful oasis made from literal trash.
They were going to be trash.
There's something we can all salvage in our lives.
So what are your roses?
And where do you want to plant them?
Thanks for listening.
