Yesterday I made it home from a 4-day stint as Camp Pastor for an elementary camp at Camp Indianola and my first question to Cyndy was, “Have you checked the garden?” Cyndy’s response was a roll of the eye and a, “umm, that’s your baby not mine,” and then she laughed and added, “but you better bring a bigger harvest bowl, baby, those cucumbers are taking over!” After catching up with Cyd and our dog Piff for a bit, I ran and grabbed the biggest serving bowl we had and raced out to my garden! The garden was exploding in cucumbers! Where did they all come from!?! What was I going to do with all these cucumbers!?!
Instantly, my mind flashed back to my childhood. As the 7th of 8 children, food was always a concern for the McBride family. One of the ways we were able to feed ourselves was with a huge garden. And by huge I mean 1 1/2 acres! Much of our summer was spent planting, weeding, hoeing, and harvesting this beast!
And one spring my mother, who was teaching at one of the last “country schools” in the Dakotas, announced that this summer the McBride’s were going to make big bucks! A family in her school had made over $1,000 last summer raising cucumbers. The Gedney pickle company had a pick up location just 30 miles away, in Trip, SD. And they needed cucumbers! “Why,” she exclaimed, “they were even giving families free cucumber seeds!”
Now this really got us going! Not the fact that the seeds were free, and not the fact that we might make some money here. (Even though that was something we were all very excited about.) But the thing that got us going was the fact that this idea came from Mom!
You see the idea factory in our family was always my dad. He had an idea a week. He churned out ideas like a dairy farm churns out butter. “Let’s get a cow!” “Let’s build a sail boat!” “Let’s go to Washington to pick apples!” My dad had ideas springing from the hairs on his feet, and make no mistake about it, he was a hobbit! The problem was that Dad’s ideas never really bore much fruit. And Mom’s job was to prune all these ideas down. She was the winnowing fork. She separated the wheat from the chaff. And with a dad like my dad, you needed a mom who had a firm no! And Mom knew her role!
But this time it was Mom with the idea. And if it was Mom’s idea it had a good chance of working out! In other words, the McBride’s we’re going to be rich by the end of the summer. In other word, Brook might get to wear a new pair of jeans to school, instead of Erin and Joe’s hand me downs! I was all in! We were all 100% behind this idea.
And so the summer of the Great Gedney Cucumber Cash Crop was on! I mean how hard could this be? This was going to be easy money!
Only…it wasn’t. Turned out growing cucumbers was easy. But growing and picking the right size of cucumber wasn’t.
The first batch of cucumbers we took to the Gedney Pickle Company was a huge batch of nice slicers. They were 6-8 inches long. And we had 8 bushels. When we put them in the car and waved to my brother, Joe, as he headed to market, that VW bug’s rear window showed 9 dollar signs reflecting from each of our hearts. But when Joe came home he brought with him a check for…wait for it…$13.26. All 9 of us groaned! What happened?!?
It seems our cucumbers were too big! Joe shared that there were certain sizes of cucumbers that the Gedney Pickle Company allowed and almost all of our cucumbers were rejects…way too big! “But,” Joe announced, “There’s some good news! The size that pays the most per pound are the real little ones! If we pick those we’ll make a killing!” There was hope in Mudville after all! And so, while Mom went to work canning 50 jars of hot dog relish, we McBride kids went to work picking baby gherkins!
The next week we sent my sister Gretchen along with Joe. Partly because there was plenty of room, because we only had one bushel basket full of cucumber (baby gherkins are tiny), and partly because we were not sure Joe hadn’t run off with the money last time!
While we waited for them to come back with our haul, we sat down to sample Mom’s pickle relish. To our surprise it was delicious! Mom had hit it out of the park! We were elated! Until, that is, Gretchen and Joe came home and announced that our big take from The Gedney Pickle Company was…$34.17!
What was the problem this time? Well, even though the price per pound was the greatest, the baby gherkins were so small they didn’t weigh anything. So the real money, it turned out, was the number 3 sized cucumber…about the size of a dill pickle. Who knew!
So, once again our hopes were renewed and we still had a chance for some bucks. That is until, just 3 days later, the neighbors geese got out and proceeded to peck holes in about 1/3 of our crop!
In the end we made about $96 on the summer adventure I call The Great Gedney Cucumber Cash Crop! But the good news is that Mom’s jars of hot dog relish were a huge hit and raised over $300 for the Wagner United Methodist church mission team!
Why am I sharing this story? Because I think being a church community through Covid and beyond is little like my families cucumber experiment. Reaching out to neighbors and friends, staying connected as a church family, and being in mission to the world has been more than just a little challenge. We’ve had to learn to adjust and learn new ways of doing things. We’ve had some failures and frustrations! We’ve even found ourselves questioning the leadership potential of the guy or gal taking our goods to the market! But in the end it is my hope that we have grown closer as a community and will continue to do everything we can to fill our pews with more than a few jars of Mom’s hot dog relish!
Your friend and pastor, still working and praying on a way to find just the right size and container for Christ in Woodinville and beyond, Brook
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