Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary...How does your garden grow?

I'm a bad gardener. Or maybe I'm an alright gardener - I at least water my plants. But I've discovered several very bad mistakes I've made:

First, I don't know what I planted. I bought this bag o' seeds and planted it - but I don't know what any of the plants are supposed to look like.

Secondly, I over-crowded my garden. The seeds were supposed to cover 500 sq ft: My garden is about 100 - and yes, all the seeds are in it.

Third, I let the weeds grow with my plants (and fourth, I don't know what weeds look like either).

So now after a couple months, I have a tangle of a garden. It has some pretty flowers, but the poor plants are nearly hopelessly intertwined. They are disfigured with extra long stalks which allow them to crawl along the ground until they find space to to point their leafy stalks at the sky. And the weeds are everywhere. I'm finally going by the "if it doesn't have flowers, it's a weed" strategy and figuring that even if a few flower plants die, the lack of congestion will do them good.

Here's a few lessons I've learned from my garden:

1. Know what you are planting. Often in life we don't think about what we want to cultivate, so we have no idea whether we're achieving it or not.

2. It's hard to tell weeds and flowers apart by the leaves. It's easier to tell them apart by whether they have flowers. The corollary: In life, it's important to know what is a leaf and what is a flower. Jesus talked about knowing trees by their fruit (not their branches or trunk or leaves); often I can't tell the difference between foliage and flowers.

3. Ignorance is not bliss - it has consequences. My garden could be so much more if I was a better gardener.

4. I should get my digital camera and take photos of my garden.