Eco-Act 003: Tending a Garden

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*

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

Eco-Act 002: Climate Change & What We Eat

Eat more plant-based

(at least before 6 pm!)

Relax. This post is NOT about going vegetarian or vegan. But it IS about the way many people eat.

Reflect for a moment on the last part of some popular advice from writer Michael Pollan:

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Not only plants; mostly plants. Maybe this could even be stretched to more plants? Would we consider enjoying a plant-based meal in place of a meat entrée occasionally? And what’s the point?

Well, Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming ranks “plant-rich diet” # 4 on its list of most impactful steps to attack climate change. Estimates cited in the book and elsewhere suggest that raising livestock accounts for 15% or more of annual greenhouse gas emissions. The Drawdown authors further note that “If cattle were their own nation, they would be the world’s third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.”* Yikes!

Obviously, the efforts of the Union family alone won’t measurably reduce greenhouse gases or global warming. So why make the effort? Because, as Pollan says, it will begin “to heal the split between what you think and what you do….”** It’s acting with hope and purpose.

And it can be delicious. Here’s a recipe from Mark Bittman’s book VB6 (vegan before 6 PM) to consider.

This might also be a great time to add some plant-based meals to the weekly menu if meat availability or prices become an issue. Whatever your motivation, let us know if you decide to try a plant-based meal for lunch or dinner!

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* Drawdown, page 39

** Drawdown, page 53

Eco-Act 001: Re-growing Scallions

This is our first *official* eco-faith action invitation to our community. We will be posting other ideas from our community weekly on this page.

grow your own scallions in a jar

the surprisingly simple way to re-use food scraps

You can use the root end (white part) of your scallions to grow some more! After using the green stalks, simply place root ends in a jar of water and refresh the water every day. Keep the water level about halfway up the scallion roots — they will drown if submerged.

Though this practice has found popularity during quarantine, my Japanese side of the family (Adrienne speaking), along with other communities, have been saving and reusing veggie scraps like this for generations. This is a great project to do with kiddos (and adults!). Use something normally discarded to generate new life, save money, grow local, and never buy scallions again!

Growing Deeper

We invite you to consider some of the “food waste, labor, & scarcity” implications of this simple act as discussed in this Eater article:

“‘Green onions are something we take for granted, and I think in a time when we’re looking at food waste more closely, and thinking about who grows our food and the sacrifices they have to make to do it, this might make a good starting point for a lot of people to really understand what it takes,’ says [Noah] Cho. Keeping a green onion alive may be as simple as giving it sunlight and changing its water every day, but it still requires attention, consistency, care; produce doesn’t just magically materialize for our consumption. For individuals like Cho, that reminder is small, but significant: ‘There’s a different appreciation I have for something as simple as a green onion, because of this.’”

— Jenny G. Zhang

Jesus was Known in the Breaking of the Bread

This is a reflection from Adrienne, whose work for Union includes Communications and these days, helping out with our food ministries.

Last Sunday, the Gospel Lectionary reading was Luke 24:13-35 — the story of the two disciples heading to Emmaus. Their world had just been turned upside-down, much like our own. Though they took time walking and speaking with Jesus, “he had [only!] been made known to them in the breaking of the bread” (v. 35). I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to truly see and know Jesus, broken open in something as common as a shared meal, a source of sustenance. This feels especially poignant in the Church’s current season of fasting from gathering and sharing in the Eucharist together.

In the midst of this pandemic, I see Christ resurrected in the embodied and relational gifts of Union: broken open abundantly for our community. Eastertide or not, it is clear that we care deeply about (yummy & nutritious) food accessibility and the interrelated communal web that we get to practice food justice with.

Though we aren’t able to do our usual 4th Sunday SCCA brunch or provide the chicken fingers and egg rolls at snack time for Compass House’s Café Club kiddos, we are finding ways to play to our strengths and tangibly feed our neighborhood:

• People are packing dozens of sack lunches every week that we distribute to LUV & ICS. Others are cooking one or a few extra meals for those in our community and for Compass House by carefully preparing, labeling, and dropping off. Last week, we estimate there were about 80 main meals, with a few desserts and baked goods thrown in!

• Other exchanges touch all corners of our web, like our legendary burritos! On Fridays, Theo and I visit the U-District Food Bank to see what produce or prepared foods we can rescue from the hundreds of pounds of excess they have had lately. We have lowered costs and reduced food waste by using lots of veggies for burritos (and soup!), in addition to sending many boxes of great quality fruits, colorful veggies, prepared foods, and bread to Compass House. (I love food waste & reclamation patterns of resurrection!)

• After we purchase the remaining burrito supplies, our famed 4th Sunday kitchen crew (Ian, Kelly, & Jeff) cook up the goods and so far, a different group each week shows up — masked, gloved, and far apart — to roll upwards of 175 burritos every Saturday. Theo then delivers these to Compass House, LUV, and ICS later in the week.

• Theo also heats up coffee pots and more burritos on Wednesdays for Street Youth Ministries to pick up and distribute…along with snacks, sandwiches, underwear, all types of hygiene products, and a hand-washing station that their ministry delivers twice-weekly to those without shelter in the U-District. We will start delivering burritos to New Horizons starting this week as well.

Theo & Andy at ICS (before masks were recommended)

Like any ecological system, we are enmeshed in a web of relations and mutually affect/are affected by our community partners. In this uncertain and disruptive time, we all have different capacities and for some, they must cook, or shop, or pray, or do nothing. And all of that is good and necessary.

It has been wonderful to experience the way Union has channeled all of its energy, prayers, resources (read: worship in action) with abundance. For me personally, this has been a gift and source of hope to see all the ways our partner relationships — which have taken time, care, and trust to build — are blossoming this spring. We are relying on our network to feed our network. And, we are reclaiming excess food that would otherwise be wasted! As we are broken open by the tangible needs of our community, may we continue to see and know Jesus and the power of his resurrection.

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Eco-faith Action Invitation:

Practice food re-distribution by making an extra meal this week for someone…bonus points for using items from your garden!