Tend your own garden

& share your bounty!

Gardening is a great opportunity to get your hands dirty, reconnect with the earth, and tend to life (our first vocation according to the Creation story). Often this sense of rootedness can inspire feelings of wonder, gratitude, and connectedness to the land — not to mention, provide delicious, accessible food that you grew yourself! It is the most local you can eat, and inevitably becomes more neighborhoodly as “you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow [your neighbors’] tools.”*

Short on space? Plant in pots, window boxes, or go vertical! Join a local P-patch or community garden (COVID-19 P-Patch tips here) or work the space you got. In the vein of creative use of space, we are excited to report that Afsaneh Rahimian, who lives nearby 415, has adopted our parking lot planter boxes as the home for an herb garden! One of our longtime friends from the Women’s Shelter still visits 415 and has helped tend the plants too. She donated enough soil for Union’s garden, and to share with our friends at LUV who are working on their own boxes. We love planting food, tending to life, and sharing resources #fortheneighborhood!

So, what will you plant? Are you excited about a particular garden project you’ve been working on while at home? Feel free to use this gardening resource list compiled by Seattle Tilth and share any other gardening tips with us (link on our Eco-faith page). We’ll leave you with some words from Michael Pollan (we recommend his article about the importance of gardening, link below!):

The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world.
-Michael Pollan*

*Michael Pollan’s NY Times article “Why Bother?” from 2008