Community...one bite at a time

We're planting a garden!!

I'm so excited--this is a LONG-time dream of mine and it's finally going to happen, on a small scale, this year. Some friends aren't using their garden space this year due to other demands on their time, so we decided, kind of collectively, tonight at our small group meeting to plant the garden for ourselves. One of the guys tilled it up tonight and I'm going tomorrow to buy tomato and pepper plants and squash, corn and bean seeds. With baseball games and swim team meets and other summer time demands, we may not get much planted this week, but that's the plan.

I was raised in a garden. Pretty much literally. One of my earliest memories is sitting in the garden with my grandparents, holding a handful of seeds in my chubby little hand and listening to my granddad tell me what each was as I dutifully laid the precious pea, bean, kernel of corn into the row he'd hoed for me. My grandparents always bought us this amazing package of seeds each year--a plethora of vegetable and flowers seeds, all mixed together. We planted, watered, weeded, watched...and harvested. I learned that cherry tomatoes taste best when you pop them in your mouth fresh (and warmly sun-kissed) from the vine.

There's nothing like the smell of freshly tilled earth--the first thing I did tonight was stick my feet into the soil and relive all those years of memories. I've had to be content with about 12 square feet of garden space in my tiny backyard for the past 4 summers, but this garden is HUGE. I feel like we've been handed a hundred acres!

There's nothing like community--we plant together, we weed and water together, we harvest together. Hmm. Kind of sounds like a church, doesn't it?

And, as a gardener and a cook, there's just something innately beautiful...sensual...satisfying...complete, I guess, about plucking a beautiful ripe tomato from your garden, preparing a meal using something you've grown with your own hands, and then blessing others with food that is the product of your labor from beginning to end.

This IS "a good thing".