Sharon Lovejoy - A Blessing of Toads

http://www.amazon.com/Country-Living-Gardener-Blessing-Toads/dp/B0058M799A

Here is Sharon Lovejoy's website.

Lovejoy Resources.

I read many of the classic gardening books at Midland Public Library, in the adult and children's sections:

• Plowman's Folly.
• Six Cows and We're in Clover.
• String Too Short To Be Saved.
• Weeds - Guardians of the Soil.
• Howard's An Agricultural Testament
• Shewel-Cooper's Compost Gardening.
• And all the Rodale Press books.

Many of these books overlap with reminisces about the past, and I find them all fun to read. I regret when I let one slip by, since they are often regional favorites and hard to find later.

Picking up this book at the Barnes and Noble made me certain to buy it later. I was hoping for a Kindle version, but the paperback is well designed and easy to read.

As I wrote before, most gardening books repeat the same old errors and have nothing useful to say, only ways to mislead people into working too hard and spending too much to interrupt the methods instilled and managed by the Creator.

Albert Howard came to India to teach them Western methods, but learned they often knew more than he did. However, he worked to establish composting and said  "the health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible." 

Lovejoy's first chapter is a work of art, so it is easy to see why she has made a career of her love of gardening. Sometimes people grow into their names, as my archeology teacher did - Lawrence Toombs - pronounced tombs.

She was going to clean up the garden for a visit from an important gardening expert. Instead, Lovejoy watched the birds harvest seeds from her mature plants. She eventually concluded that a seedy garden was good for the birds and everything else. Her advice on growing plants for seed is packed with real information rather than copy and paste truisms.

She loved going to her grandmother's garden each day and has the same reaction now - cannot wait to get into the garden. One plot of land, no matter how humble, can elicit the same joy as it develops. Mrs. Wright came over and said, "Your bulbs are coming up." Since I overplant everything, we are planning how to share flowers and vegetables as they develop. Altar flowers often go to her house and she takes them to a patient who is in hospice care. Today we received a thank you note from the family, about how much they enjoy the flowers. The latest were the Valentine's Day flowers on the altar.

Our garden now includes many families, through distributing roses, extra seed, and - this summer - vegetables. We collect newspapers and turn them into flowers.

Neighbors are learning how to garden more productively, spending less money while getting better results. The veteran is gong to prune my trees, and he is adopting Jackson Mulch for his rose beds. He admired my roses last summer, and I admired his crabgrass.

We had some patches of healthy, tall-growing crabgrass doing to seed, so I pointed out to our helper that crabgrass is a grain brought to America and harvested in the early days. We mulched on top of it later, and the straw bales are on it now. But I have no grudge against a certain amount of crabgrass in the right places. The birds which eat the small grains enjoy it, and people go to the store to buy similar grain to replace what they just destroyed with Roundup.

Another Bad Copycat from Martin Luther College - WELS. Far Too Much Bro-Love

Cat Locked Outside Needs Help - Fast!

"Paul McCain is outside, lecturing me on how to blog. Let me in!"

Birds Learn Gratitude at the Feeder When Ice Coats Their Food

The nuthatch was created to find bugs in bark,
so it easily runs up and down trees, eating pests.

Monday morning was snow and ice-covered, which is when birds need food the most. Snow is not a big problem. They rummage through several inches of snow to get what they need, and bugs are easy to find on tree bark and in bushes.

The ice was all over the Town Car, a thick layer more like iron, and scraper did little damage to it. That is bird-feeding weather.

Undaunted, Sassy Sue and I went into the backyard and dumped sunflower seeds and meal worms at the Jackson Bird Spa.

When birds and squirrels are hungry, they are no longer so picky about their food. They flock around every food source and raise a ruckus, letting the others know where the food is. We normally have squirrels eating in the presence of birds, with little scraps going on. Starlings charge other starlings as they compete for seeds and suet.

I started the suet bags months ago, assuming it would take time for them to feel safe to the birds. Now the insect-eaters flock to  the hanging bags - and swing, eat, fuss, and fight. Starlings make a happy burbling sound when feeding, so we open the window and listen to them.

Purple finches and chickadees love the sunflower seed feeder near our window.
The position of the feeder makes it difficult for larger birds to land and eat.

Sparrows will always clean up.

Starlings, wasps, and hornets are often despised,
but they are the premier enemies of bugs.

One moment the birds are all there. Soon they leave as a group. Now a male cardinal is sitting in the pile of sunflower seeds, picking out his meal.

Male cardinals are especially cautious, so they either show up in groups (before mating season) or feed one at a time when the big crowd is gone.

Creating the new normal, step by step,
until no one can object without being vilified.
Romans 1 fulfilled. 2 Thessalonians in spades.

Feeding During Hostile Weather Is Good for the Birds
The food we offer birds before, during, and after a storm helps them get through the cold weather. They use up more calories in cold weather and find it harder to eat. They may be just as starved after an ice storm as the snow-shovelers are after clearing the walks. Therefore, extra food means more of them will live through the cold weather.

People chatter their teeth about minus 20 wind chills in New York, but we had minus 60 in Southern Minnesota for two weeks. That devastated flocks of winter birds.

I had flat window sills outside and lined them with seed. In the aftermath of crippling snow storms, the squirrels would get on the sill and eat as if it was their last meal. A squirrel that only ate the best corn was happy to chew kernels out of the ice on the sill.

No Gratitude in the Past
America had little or no gratitude for its blessings in the past. We had traditional, Biblical congregations where people worshiped instead of eating popcorn and drinking cola.

We took our freedoms for granted, as if we would always have them.

God created a land where freedom could flourish and citizens could enjoy prosperity from abundant food, mineral, and water resources. Scientists have not figured out how this happened (apart from God's will) but the breadbasket of the world developed without trees, which should have grown up in the Great Plains. The trees had to be imported, so the earliest settlers lived in sod houses. Yuk.

America was almost solid woods from Connecticut to Ohio, but all that stopped at the Great Plains, where prairie grasses with enormous root systems grew, fed the buffalo, got manured, burned in occasional fires, and grew again - building layer upon layer of rich humus soil.

The soil was like pudding in the Midwest. When people jumped from their wagons, the soil showed the shock-waves, like a giant water bed. The only time I have created that effect has been when an entire compost pit was filled with rich sod and rotted.

No one other place has top soil 20 feet deep in places. The European settlers added one more factor. They brought the energetic their earthworms  with a Protestant work ethic. These earthworms spread rapidly and plowed the soil long before John Deere created his polished steel plow. The richness of the soil was a problem, until he solved it and created an industry, a company that defined my hometown of Moline.

The Age of Management by Lying, by Silence, by Theft and Deception

Historic St. John Lutheran Church, on 8th and Vliet in Milwaukee,
was stolen by WELS and Jeske pals.
No one answered how they justified this theft of property and endowment,
and now WELS is running the so-called congregation they kicked out.

When St. John Lutheran Church, independent of any synod, was going to put their services on the Internet, a law firm and two members locked out the pastor, took over the parsonage, grabbed the endowment fund, and shut down the congregation. Here are the details of the theft of St. John Lutheran Church.

This was not some country parish, but the mother church of WELS and an important one for the Synodical Conference. Suddenly, the church is open for business again, with an ex-pastor of WELS in charge, all the resources links on its web page pointing to WELS. No explanation. No apology. When I posted a link to a Facebook page, the FB friend removed it (typical WELS) and the celebration of St. John the Newly Reopened continued.

I heard the thieves recently gave back boxes and boxes of Pastor Kevin Hastings' personal effects. Why do church leaders support theft?

My previous post on a St. John's group went like this:

Gregory L. Jackson

September 19, 2014 · Springdale, AR

I read a post that St. John's will be open for a few hours on a Saturday. Anybody know anything?

The answer was - the church would be open a few hours for a Milwaukee event - Open Doors Milwaukee. Heavy irony indeed, since the doors were locked and the church was darkened, thanks to the work of the Jeske Mob.

They closed the St. John Lutheran Church for Holy Week and Easter in 2013, keeping it closed until - voila! - everything resumed under new management, two years later.

Who is Pastor Roger Drews? Who called him to take over the congregation? We all know WELS is a lawless, abusive sect, but this really sets a record.

Silence. 

Since SP Mark Schroeder does not even respond to a certified letter, after signing the receipt, I am not going to write a letter. Nor should anyone else bother.

WELS-ELS-LCMS leaders.

LCMS Started with Lies, Abuse, and Theft

There is a precedent, the beginning of the Synodical Conference. After serving as Bishop Martin Stephan's hatchet man, CFW Walther organized a riot that came down from St. Louis to  Perryville, threatened the bishop, stole his land, books, and gold, and forced him by gunpoint to leave Missouri for Illinois.

The Synodical Conference cut their teeth on lying by replaying this series of felonies as a noble Reformer (Walther) suddenly finding out Stephan was an adulterer (ha!) and giving the horrid man several options. They still tell those lies in Perryville at the various Walther shrines -and people believe it. 

There was no Saxon Migration until Stephan was suspended, his career over in Germany, for immorality and misuse of funds. See Zion on the Mississippi for details. His lawyers were Marbach and Vehse, the principal lay leaders of the sect when they sailed to America. Nobody knew? When Sephan took long walks in the woods in the middle of the night - with young women - nobody knew?

Why is everyone laughing?
I know - you keep paying for this.

Management by Lying, by Silence, by Theft and Deception

Our society has followed the ecclesiastics in Don't Ask, Don't Tell management. 

The Stalinism found in so many corporations can easily be found in denominations. Do you have a question? You're fired. You are not a team player. You are not loyal. You are the reason we are falling apart. Shun the evildoer. Shun. Shun.

How else can anyone explain the descent of all the mainline denominations--especially the Lutherans--from basic Biblical beliefs to widespread apostasy, endowed seminaries teaching rationalism, and the routine theft of church properties?

I often post Episcopalian articles because the abuse is out in the open with Presiding Bishop Schori and the tranquil traditionalists are in full rebellion against her. Active bishops took their diocese out of the denomination and fought the thieves in court, often losing, but recently winning - South Carolina.

The mainlines have marched back into the Rationalism of the 18th Century - the Enlightenment. If it cannot be explained by human reason, forget it. Anyone who believes the Bible is a crackpot and not to be trusted.

According to studies...

"Have you done a self-study of your congregation? Gather all the statistics and we will use your metrics to revitalize your congregation." Metrics are instruments, but some of us remember when the only instruments were the Instruments of Grace, the Means of Grace, the Word and Sacraments.

As the chairman of the board of Seminex, the first gay Lutheran seminary,
Jungkuntz called himself Old School. He prospered, moving from WELS
to LCMS, from LCMS to AELC and the ALC.