Hebrews 10:26 - How working in a garden changed my life....

1st graders harvest what they planted and roast the veggies!

Since 2008, when we first started the school garden, I have been on a deepening path of trying to live out my principles relating to conserving and leading a healthy life.

As early the 70's it was clear that fundamental change to our consumption patterns was necessary.  After Reagan became president I gave up on changing things. His strong opposition to government regulation rendered large swaths of environmental legislation  impotent. (This is not a republican/democrat issue - EPA and the Clean Air Act were Nixonian--remember) I couldn't even teach about Earth Day in the public schools. To do so brought accusatory phone calls from parents who believed that mentioning it was teaching a communistic world view.  There was no reasoning with these folk that planting seeds, growing food, or using less plastic was a simple recognition that resources are finite. No matter how I talked about these issues I could not convince these parents that teaching about this was an act of patriotism. 

Read how school gardens make strong minds and healthy bodies!

When we began the garden it was mostly about student health, food security and healthy outdoor life-long activity.  When over time, I saw the soil go from being dusty, dead dirt to being an exciting living community of organisms.  I realized that I did not need commercial fertilizer if I used composted  cafeteria waste to enrich it each season, nor did I need to use herbicides or pesticides if I was careful about complimentary planting and weeding.  So we became an organic garden.

Memories flooded back from childhood in the garden with my parents and grandparents, in thickets on Sunday afternoons by the side of the road, walking down the canes and getting scratched up as we picked the plump sun ripened berries that soon became cobbler with home made ice cream melting on top!  These berries were part of a common wealth growing as they were in hedgerows and bar ditches!

I got to know other people who were also on this path, and together with Chef Martha Stamps, a leader in the slow food movement here in Nashville,  we spent an hour a week becoming more aware of the many perspectives about the importance of local, fresh food to our health and well being.  We learned about agribusiness and how our food was being grown and transported around the world with HUGE  carbon impacts.  We learned about how animals were being raised, slaughtered and processed with the huge polluting of watersheds.  We learned about overfishing, the acidification of the oceans, and the added pollution by farmed seafood and the impact of plastic waste aggregating there! 

I was stunned to see animals bred so that they could not even support their own weight and were contained for the entire short miserable lives in metal crates. Knowledge is a terrible thing.  As a Christian I was well aware of the scripture from Hebrews 10:26 "Dear friends, if we deliberately continue sinning after we have received knowledge of the truth, there is no longer any sacrifice that will cover these sins." 

It became critical for me to find local farmers who raised their own animals humanely without hormones and antibiotics, who raised their vegetables without pesticides, herbicides, and artificial fertilizers.  These things cost far more than the heavily subsidized agribusiness of Smithfield or Hormel, but I chose to pay these prices and found myself wasting far less food and eating less meat.  I learned from these farmers and the food that I put on my plate took on a new meaning.

By now, I believed that there would be no movement on the major issues relating to these issues, but as for me, I was going to live out my deeper understanding in as much as possible.  I was committed to help children learn to taste the difference between the food they bought at the grocery store and what was grown in the garden.  I learned that they will eat and enjoy tasty vegetables especially if they help grow them!  We made spinach salad, roasted vegetables, and fried green tomatoes.  The children helped cook in the library, and declared everything to be tasty!  I knew I was on the right track last spring when I saw a flock of children descend on the garden and eat (unwashed mind you) pea pods filled with sweet English peas.  In 2009 children would regularly say, "EWE that has dirt on it"  and sometimes they didn't want to eat it even after washing it (the vegetables in the store afterall are shiny with wax and packaged in wrap)!

So where do we go from here?  I'm open to suggestions.