wfn.org | Harvest of hope: The new gardens of Eden

[NewsDesk <NewsDesk@UMCOM.ORG>]

March 19, 2002  News media contact: Tim Tanton7(615)742-54707Nashville,
Tenn.  10-21-71BP{114}

NOTE: Photographs are available with this report.

By Ray Waddle*

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (UMNS) - It sounds like an innocent idea, but a
revolutionary one too: Get people together and start a garden, a community
garden, a church garden.

Dig in the dirt and relieve stress. Grow enough food to feed the
neighborhood. Cultivate a plot and replenish farmland. And hit a lick
against poverty: Establish gardens so poor people can raise their own
nutritious produce and sell the surplus to local markets.

Start a garden and change the world.

Recently in Nashville, a room full of people - gardeners, preachers, hunger
advocates, crusaders - got an earful on the hows and whys of community
gardening, gardens started at churches and community centers.

"There's a spiritual dimension to it," said Del Ketcham, a hunger relief
advocate who helped organize the meeting at West End United Methodist Church
in February. "There you are in the middle of the city, and helicopters might
be overhead and sirens going by, but there's no greater feeling of peace
than to be working in that garden."

Community gardens have been around for decades. But the idea is just now
gathering steam among religious leaders who see it as a potential
grass-roots force for fighting social ills like poverty and the decline of
farmland.

In places like Nashville, the community gardening movement is fledgling,
still trying to sprout. A few local community centers host gardens, and a
shorter list of churches do. So organizers were delighted at the session
turnout - 45 people.

Advocates believe it's time that congregations step forward to start
community gardens. 

"I invite you to become stewards of your land, and that means to become a
gardener," said Julie Berbiglia, an organic garden specialist at
Scarritt-Bennett Center in Nashville.
"Taking care of creation is an important part of stewardship."

A church could easily create a garden in an unused corner on the grounds or
on a rooftop, advocates said. Or combine with another congregation and start
one at a suitable off-site location. A one-eighth acre community garden can
be as productive as a two-acre plot of conventional farmland, they
estimated.

"Forgive me for saying hell, but we need to raise a little," said the Rev.
Thomas Henderson, a farmer-minister whose quivering voice revealed his
passion about the subject. "The health of our country is at stake."

Doing God's work

Henderson, based in the South Carolina Annual (regional) Conference, is on a
crusade for the future of agriculture. He establishes community gardens in
inner-city poverty zones, usually vacant lots. The gardens provide
nutritious food for neighborhoods that don't have access to fresh produce or
grocery stores. The gardens also supply soup kitchens. And they encourage
job skills: Gardeners learn to market, advertise and transport their surplus
for sale at local outlets or churches.

Henderson was one of a procession of speakers representing various
organizations at the Nashville session, including the Society of St. Andrew,
Scarritt-Bennett Center, the United Methodist Board of Global Ministries and
Earth Matters Tennessee. 

The event was co-sponsored by the Nashville Hunger Relief Ministry of the
Society of St. Andrew, which oversees various relief efforts, including
gleaning programs that distribute produce that would otherwise go to waste.
The society works closely with the Commission on United Methodist Men in
hunger-relief efforts. Another co-sponsor was the Cooperative Ministries
Committee of the Tennessee Conference of the United Methodist Church.

All the organizations involved have a stake in creating "greening networks"
of people and entities - loose federations that promote stewardship of earth
and community spirit.

In community gardening, they find a touchstone for their biblical values.
They see gardening as a human-scale activity that can make a difference in
the larger world as well as promote therapeutic stress-relief and fun for
all ages, cutting across racial and class barriers.

"When we're working in the garden, we're on our knees - we're doing God's
work out there," said Sizwe Herring, who directs Earth Matters Tennessee.
The group is engaged in ecology education and composting/gardening
initiatives.

Community gardening is also community building. A gardening project
involving people from all walks of life tends to minimize or eradicate
distinctions of 	education, affluence, race or class, advocates said.

"Everybody gets down to earth in a garden," said Jim Polk, who oversees a
community garden at the Cohn Adult Learning Center in Nashville. "Little
bitty kids, older people, people in between. Nobody's way up here, or way
down there. We all learn together."
	
'Big trouble' ahead

Much of the meeting was given over to the witness of Henderson. He brings
together two callings in life - ministry and farming - to campaign for the
"theological issue of this century," he said. That issue is the uncertain
future of farming, he said, referring to the crisis of sustainable land and
the urgent need to keep farmers in business in an era of low crop prices,
declining numbers of farmers, vanishing top soil and a looming population
explosion.

"If we don't make farming economically viable, we'll be in big trouble by
the end of this century," said Henderson, agriculture consultant to the
United Methodist Board of Global Ministries.

The world could have as many as 20 billion to 22 billion people to feed by
the end of the century, he warned. There's no time for complacency.

"Food travels an average of 1,300 miles to get to your plate," he said.
"We've got to educate ourselves to grow our own gardens and grow our own top
soil." 		

Too much food is imported from countries whose lower safety standards could
threaten the U.S. food supply, he suggested. Yet another reason to start a
community garden: You can raise traditional tomatoes and other fruits and
vegetables that are tastier and more nutritious than the store-bought
variety.

"We've got to take the time to investigate the issues," he said. "We live in
a comfortable time, even after Sept. 11, and we're drifting back to that
comfort zone, which we do so well."

Mark Beeler, a county agriculture extension agent in middle Tennessee,
underscored the flux and uncertainty of farming. Looking at the state, for
example, he noted recent declines in the size of farms, total land in farms,
the number of full-time farmers, and the number of dairy, corn and swine
farms. A big reason for the declines is increased efficiency and
productivity of active farms. But the average age of farmers is climbing,
and fewer young people are joining the business.
	
Most people are complacent about farm issues because hardly anybody knows a
farmer anymore, he suggested. Grocery stores look well stocked, so people
have no sense of a possible crisis. Community gardening is a way to find a
connection with the rhythms of farming and with the larger economic forces
shaping the destiny of agriculture.

"Most of us are removed from agriculture," he said. "We're not directly
connected."

Other speakers shared their own fresh adventures in the crusade.

Last year, members of Blackman United Methodist Church in Murfreesboro, near
Nashville, ploughed up about two acres of unused land on the eight-acre
church property and let the children grow turnips.

This year, plans are more ambitious. The Blackman congregation wants to
raise corn, beans, pumpkins and other crops. Most of the produce will go to
food banks or domestic violence shelters. Some produce will be sold to raise
money for church missions.

They plan to allow various units of the congregation (the youth group, for
instance) to work their own part of the big garden. Another possibility is
to hold a harvest festival meal later this year to celebrate the new
garden's bounty.

"There are so many ways we can use this garden - as a mission, as education,
as fellowship," said the Rev. Gayle Watson, minister of the church.

Tips for starting out

Over and over, a theme at the Nashville session resurfaced: Starting a
garden is easy. But be sure there's enough commitment to the work of
planting, weeding and nurture.

A speaker declared: Start small. Don't try to do too much. But start. Do
something.

"I'm here to take away all your excuses, so you'll get out and get in the
dirt," said Julie Berbiglia, the organic garden coordinator for
Scarritt-Bennett Center, the Nashville retreat and conference center
associated with the United Methodist Church.

Berbiglia's specialty is biblical gardens, the cultivation of plants found
in the Bible. The purpose is to harvest food or teach kids and others about
Scripture. Biblical garden plants might include grapevines and mustard,
herbs like dill or horseradish, apple trees and dogwood trees, dandelions
and various flowers. 

"Fear not - you don't have to create the perfect garden, grow difficult
plants or spend lots of money to grow a biblical garden," Berbiglia said.

She offered tips and project ideas for a biblical or community garden at
church:
7	Consider growing flowers for use at church events.
7	Plant a section of vegetables for donation to a food bank or
homeless shelter.
7	Grow plants mentioned in the Bible and label them with information
about their stories and meanings.
7	Consider a bench or sitting place for meditation and prayer.
7	Start a compost pile.
7	Include a memory garden, growing plants in memory of special people.
7	Think through the reasons for starting a garden. Who will care for
it? Who will take responsibility? Where's the best location?
7	Use available resources - speakers and volunteers from the Master
Gardeners Association; library books; the HGTV cable network; the American
Community Gardening Association (Web site: communitygarden.org).

Seek the wisdom of gardeners in the congregation, Berbiglia urged. Take
stock of the biblical plants that might already be growing on the grounds.
Create a handout map that locates those plants and make some labels to place
near them.

"Have a plant 'pot luck' and ask people to share plants that represent
friends or family members," she suggested. "Use these plants to create a
memory garden. Put a bench in the garden and encourage people to pray and
remember."

Organizers summarized the Nashville session as an effort to tie the local to
the global - a way to make connections between planting seeds in the dirt
outside the church and planting seeds of activism to serve the larger world.

Berbiglia made one other point that brought things full circle: Don't forget
composting.

"Compost belongs in a biblical garden because it represents renewal and the
cycle of life," she writes in an education packet on "Growing a Biblical
Garden."

"There is a composting saint: St. Phocas, a gardener. The soldiers came to
find and kill this teacher of forbidden Christianity. He saw them coming,
dug his grave in the garden, fed the soldiers dinner and gave them lodging.
In the morning, he told them who he was and requested that he be buried in
the garden so he could feed the earth with his remains. The soldiers did as
St. Phocas requested. Really, you can look this up!"

More information is available by calling Ketcham at (615) 340-7125.
# # #
*Waddle, former religion editor at The Tennessean, is a writer in Nashville,
Tenn.

*************************************
United Methodist News Service
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