yearofplenty

UK Gardeners Start Community Garden in a Graveyard

Go watch this lovely video that offers a window into how the Incredible Edible program in Todmorden, England is transforming the city's food culture, which happens to include a community garden popping up in a graveyard (at around 4:07 in the video.) I love the commentary of the graveyard gardener at the end of the video:

I think what we're into in this sort of work isn't all the planting and that stuff. That's really good, and it's symbolically important, but it's not the core thing. It's about thinking about what we could be, and what our communities could be, and what our businesses could be. And just how we live on the earth...so we grow stuff, so we share it, so we celebrate it, we have events, and we constantly sort of tumble forward into a better future...Food is just such a lovely connecter to do that with. It's just such a lovely way in.

Tumbling forward into a better future. Amen.

Christian Conference to Explore Intersections of Local Church, Land and Agriculture

Today is the last day of the outdoor Millwood Farmers' Market. This will be the conclusion of four years of hosting and running the market at Millwood Presbyterian Church. Being a Farmers' Market manager and a pastor has stretched the normal bounds of pastoral and church work, and has led many I'm sure to wonder what we're up to. In my upcoming book I have a whole chapter titled The Kingdom of God is Like a Farmers' Market, where I lay out the theological and cultural premise for the farmers' market as a ministry.

Far from being an isolated experiment, our church farmers' market is part of a larger exploration going on in North American churches, making connections between food, land and faith. One of the pioneering ministries, plowing new ground, (or if you prefer a more sustainable metaphor, direct-seeding new crops) is the Englewood Christian Church in urban Indianapolis, and more specifically their online ministry called, The Englewood Review of Books (ERB) by Chris Smith, which is part of their community development work. You can follow ERB on Twitter and Facebook. They offer some of the best comprehensive review of books and leaders making vital connections between faith and the environment, especially agriculture.

They will be hosting an upcoming conference titled A Rooted People: Church, Place and Agriculture in an Urban World. Claudio Oliver, one of their speakers, is a regular commenter on this blog from Brasil. I wish I could be there.

"Year of Plenty" Book Manuscript is Done and in the Hands of the Publisher

Picture: Our first year with the labyrinth garden in 2008.

After months of being holed up late at night writing and editing, the manuscript for a book based on this blog is done and if all goes as planned the editor will send it to the publisher today. It's being published by Sparkhouse Press, an independent division of Augsburg Fortress Publishers, the publishing house of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The book shares the story of our experiences in 2008 consuming everything local, used, homegrown and homemade and reflects on the ways that our Christian faith intersects with those experiences.

There are already some great entries in the "year-long-experiment" genre, especially in the green living, local food arena. Animal Vegetable Miracle and No-Impact Man are the most high-profile examples. More broadly, Julie & Julia, Eat, Pray, Love, The Happiness Project, and The Year of Living Biblically have made a big splash in the publishing arena. It's such a common premise for a book that someone's created subtitle-o-matic to help authors come up with a subtitle for such experiments-turned-books.

Year of Plenty (subtitle yet to be determined) will be another entry in the year-long-experiment genre but will be unique in exploring how the Christian faith and the church enters into and engages the cultural cutting edge of locavores, downshifters, farmers' markets, Food Inc., backyard chickens, community gardens and Going Green. It includes some good practical advice about turning your lawn into a vegetable garden, how to get started raising chickens in your backyard and how to start a farmers' market. I think it will serve as a good introduction to Wendell Berry, whose writing and thought plays a prominent role in the book. I hope it will be accessible beyond the Christian/Church market but I'll let others be the judge of that.

And beware readers of the blog. You may just find some your past comments on the blog in the book.

So stay tuned for more info. Last I heard it's due to come out in March 2011, just in time for a new growing season in the garden.

Spokane Community Garden Tours - September 18

Picture: Fall harvest from Pumpkin Patch Community Garden in the foreground ready to be picked up at the Second Harvest mobile food bank distribution in Millwood last Friday.

Spokane Regional Health Disctrict and Spokane County Extension are sponsoring a Community Garden Tour of Spokane area gardens. All-in-all there are 11 gardens to explore on September 18 from 10am to 2pm. Included in the tour is the Pumpkin Patch Community Garden that I've been involved with during its inaugural 2010 season. The map of the tour is below. Download GardenTour-2010 map

Pumpkin Patch Community Garden - Before and After

The first year of the Pumpkin Patch Community Garden has far surpassed my expectations. Here are a couple before and after pictures. Go here for more posts on community gardens. Thanks to everyone who has made it come together in such a short time.

Year of Plenty Interview with Beliefnet Senior Editor

Holly Liebowitz Rossi is a Senior Editor for Beliefnet.com, and also writes a blog on the intersections of faith, food and gardening called Sparks in the Soil.  She was kind enough to post an interview with me on her blog, talking about the connections I find between my faith and our food and garden adventures. Go here to check it out.

The Return of a Community Pumpkin Patch

Picture: Kids playing in between the mounds of newly planted pumpkins at the Pumpkin Patch.

We held the Grand Opening for the Pumpkin Patch Community Garden on Saturday and it is exciting to see the boxes start to fill up. We also planted the pumpkin patch portion of the garden with mounds of wonderfully named pumpkins; Spooktacular, Jack-Be-Little, Casper (white), French Cinderella, Giant, Big Max, and of course, Jack 'O Lanterns. (pumpkins have the best names)

When I inquired of the Paper Mill last Spring about the possibility of a community garden on the barren empty lot, I was surprised to find out that it had been a pumpkin patch for a quarter century before the Bridge construction turned it into a hard packed bus turnaround. (I was also pleased along the way to find out I wasn't the only one thinking there was great potential for a community project at the site.)

As word spread about the project there were all these wonderful memories that started to emerge. People said, "That's where my parents took me every year to get our pumpkin for Halloween." Others pointed out that not only could you buy pumpkins there but there were kids' hay rides and other Fall festivities. It is remarkable how almost everyone seems to know what you're talking about when you mention the pumpkin patch. When it came time to name the site everyone agreed that it should be called the "Pumpkin Patch Community Garden" and that we should plant pumpkins again, bringing back the tradition that had left such a large impression.

So Saturday pumpkins returned to the patch for the first time in almost a decade. Kids ran under the sprinklers, jumped in mud puddles and rejoiced. I'm looking forward to cool Fall days when they return to pick out their special pumpkin.

Inspiring Before and After Community Garden Pictures

GOOD has a great photo spread of an urban garden;

Over the last few years, urban gardening has grown increasingly more prominent—as an emblem of demand for healthier, more natural food; as a centerpiece of community-minded interaction; and as a means of cultivating beautifully functional public spaces. All these factors are in evidence at the Somerset Community Garden in South Providence, Rhode Island, where families of African, Cambodian, Dominican, European, Hmong, Laotian, Liberian, and other origins share a public space where they maintain all sorts of different crops. Photographed across many seasons over a two-year span by Lucas Foglia, "The Garden" covers an entire city block and continues to attract a vast array of individuals.

Go here if you're interested in participating in a community garden in the west valley of Spokane.

Hear Year of Plenty on NPR Radio Program "God in the Garden"

Here's the full length NPR radio program, Edible Idaho, about church's and community gardens. I chime in about half way through. Go here for the manuscript to the program.

0503GH_GodsGarden

God in the Garden

 

Picture: Dan Hansen helps put in irrigation at the Pumpkin Patch Community Garden.

Here's a promo for the NPR "God in the Garden" radio program that I was interviewed for a couple weeks ago. It will play on Boise NPR tomorrow 91.5 and then probably trickle out to other northwest NPR affiliates. If you're interested I suppose you can email your local NPR affiliate and request that they broadcast it.

GodinGardenPromo(2)

I am discovering in my work with the Pumpkin Patch Community Garden that "Community" is the word of emphasis. It feels less like an experiment in cultivating plants than it does an experiment in forming a community of friends and neighbors. We show up as strangers and after a couple hours of putting together irrigation equipment we leave as friends.

The Pumpkin Patch isn't a "church garden" or a "faith-based garden" like some of those described in the radio program. It's a community garden with a church as partner, working alongside others toward a renewed future for our neighborhood.

That being said I do see these things through my lens of faith. Here's a quote from Wendell Berry's essay, "Health is Membership," that echoes some of my thoughts about the "community" in "community gardens."

I take literally the statement in the Gospel of John that God loves the world. I believe that the world was created and approved by love, that it subsists, coheres, and endures by love, and that, insofar as it is redeemable, it can be redeemed only by love. I believe that divine love, incarnate and indwelling in the world, summons the world always toward wholeness, which ultimately is reconciliation and atonement with God.

I believe that health is wholeness. For many years I have returned again and again to the work of the English agriculturist Sr Albert Howard who said, in The Soil and Health, that 'the whole problem of health in soil, plant, animal and man [is] one great subject.'

...I believe that the community - in the fullest sense; a place and all its creatures - is the smallest unit of health and that to speak of the health of an isolated individual is a contradiction in terms.

Community gardens are about seeds and soil and harvest, but they are also about wholeness and health and yes, even love. They take us isolated individuals and place us in a more proper context of cooperation and sharing. I look forward to seeing how things develop through the summer. (I'm learning that these gardens also reflect some of the unhealth of our community. We're not even up and running yet but the vandals and hooligans have already made their presence known.)

I'll post a link to the whole show once it's posted and post some updates on the progress of the garden throughout the summer.