Tomato Heaven!

Hi everyone.   

This past month has been all about tomatoes and the abundant harvests that God has blessed us with this year.  Despite the crazy high temps earlier in the month, the drenching rains that followed, and the hurricane force winds the other day, our tomato harvest has been amazing and we praise God for every fruit picked!

At this writing, we are looking forward to the 4^th Annual Tomato Sandwich Supper this evening (7/27) as we enjoy our favorite summer sandwich filled with sliced Brandwines and Cherokee Purples dressed with some Duke mayo and pesto!  Thank you in advance for all those that will be joining us tonight to share in God’s Goodness!

We are also looking forward to the 2^nd part of this year’s summer series “Cooking, Canning, and Planning with the Garden of Concord” as we jam together tomorrow (7/28) with a canning class led by Kristin Hicks of “Put it Up-Pittsboro”.  Kristin was actually my soil science teacher last year and in her free time, enjoys canning a variety of fruits, veggies, and nuts and sells at farmer’s markets and co-ops.  Thank you again in advance for those of you that join us tomorrow.

The third and final part of our summer series will be on Saturday, August 11^th from 2-4pm led by garden member, Traci Phillips, as she helps us “plan” our meals and learn more about wellness and nutrition (especially for our kidz!).  Also later in the month on Friday, August 24^th is our always much anticipated “Harvest Celebration Dinner” as we share together with our community, God’s continued blessings of our summer harvests. 

We continue “Tasty Tuesdays” on the first Tuesday of every month as we invite anyone interested in “trying out” the garden for an evening and/or anyone wanting to share in our harvest.   The kidz have enjoyed  “Water Fun Nights” every Tuesday along with “Kidz Thyme” on Thursdays.   Thank you to the leaders and parents that have helped make both of these events so rewarding (and refreshing) to our Jr. Gardeners!

We continually praise God for His gift of The Garden of Concord as he teaches and enables us to work and take care of His creation by growing good food, friendships, and sharing His love with many!  Thank you everyone for your continued prayers and support of our garden! 

It WILL be good!

-Donna Poe

Garden Coordinator

Plenty of PIZZA Plantings Growing in the Garden!

(7/3/12) **Sorry this posting is late!

Hi everyone.  As we move into the heat of the summer, our garden is on fire with many pizza plantings to include plenty of peppers, tons of tomatoes, and the beginning of construction for our brick pizza oven!  We enjoyed a pizza preview at our Pizza Cooking Class this past month as Debbie Cook shared her Pampered Chef products and recipes in creating/serving many different (delicious!) pizzas using our garden goodies for our guests.  Thank you everyone for your appetites and support as we raised over $120 from individual donations along with a percentage of Pampered Chef sales to be applied towards the building of the brick oven by Kyle Gault and the earning of his Eagle badge.

Our “Cooking, Planning, and Canning with the Garden of Concord” summer series continues this month with a canning class scheduled for Saturday, 7/28 from 2-4pm.  More info to be processed soon!  Also this month, we look forward to tasting that first ripened tomato sandwiched in between some Duke mayo (and a little pesto:) at our Tomato Sandwich Supper on Friday, 7/27 at 6pm!  MMMMMMM! 

We began “Tasty Tuesdays” last month and will continue the first Tuesday of each continuing month as we share our garden with the community while encouraging them to “Taste and see that the Lord is good!” (Psalm 34:8)   Please invite your friends and neighbors (including yourself!) to visit the garden and enjoy some of God’s abundance..for free!  We have also begun our “Water Nights” on Tuesdays to help kool the Kidz followed by a thyme of continued fun on Thursday nightz with “Kidz Thyme”!

Thank you everyone for your prayers and support of our garden.  It WILL be good!

-Donna Poe

Garden Coordinator

Dirt, Bodies, and Food: Our Reconciliation with Creation

Just had to share this mazing article below!  It is written by Norman Wirzba, a Research Professor of Theology, Ecology,and Rural Life at Duke Divinity School in Durham, NC.  http://divinity.duke.edu/community-student-life/divinity-magazine/spring-2012/dirt-bodies-and-food-our-reconciliation-creation  Thank you Tori Hastings for sharing! 

Every meal can be an exercise in practicing reconciliation with God's good, beloved creation.

Some of my friends, only half-jokingly, refer to me as “the theologian of dirt.” I quite like that description. It puts me in a good location and in good company, particularly if we remember the scene in Genesis 2 where God is in the garden with hands in the dirt, holding the soil so close as to breathe the warmth of life into it. What a shocking and profound picture of God. What a contrast to other ancient pictures of the divine as aloof or violent. God the gardener loves soil, enriches and waters it, and blesses its growth so that our years might be crowned with bounty (Psalm 65). As a matter of ecological order, if God didn’t love soil, along with all the plants and animals that depend on it, God couldn’t love you or me–because there would be no you or me to love. We come out of the ground, depend on it daily for nurture and support, and will eventually return to it. The day God ceases to cherish and breathe life into the soil is also the day we all cease to exist (Psalm 104).

Scripture is clear that we are supposed to share in God’s love for the ground. Adam is created from out of the soil (adamah) and then is promptly told to take care of it (Genesis 2:15). Human identity and vocation center on the work of gardening, because it is through gardening that we learn who we are (dependent on and nurtured by soil), where we are (in a vulnerable world in need of protection and care), and what the goal of our living is (sharing God’s delight for a garden-world that is beautifully and wonderfully made). By becoming gardeners we are given the opportunity to participate in–and thus learn to appreciate, even if only minimally–God’s attentive, patient, weeding, and watering ways with the world. The “garden of delight”–for this is what the Garden of Eden literally means–is our first home. It is the place where we discover God’s creating love made fragrant, tactile, audible, visible, and delectable.

Today’s widespread, systematic destruction of forests, fields, wetlands, and waters indicates that we have refused, sometimes even held in contempt, our gardening responsibilities. We have denied our origin in and dependence on soil. We have forgotten that soil matters deeply to God, and that it is the medium through which God daily shows love for creatures.

In what can be described as a fit of ecological amnesia and plain stupidity–or perhaps rebellion against our condition of exile–we allow soil to erode or be poisoned to death by the heavy use of synthetic fertilizers and increasingly toxic herbicides. Rather than living in sympathetic and harmonious relation with the earth and its creatures, we have often opted for neglect, exploitation, and war.

How this has come to be makes for a very complex story. One crucial and highly influential strand centers on a centuries-old disdain for materiality and embodiment. According to this worldview, what really matters about us is our souls. Embodied life, along with the dependence on soil and fellow creatures such embodiment always presupposes, is morally inferior as we make our way to a spiritual, otherworldly heaven. The philosophers Pythagoras and Socrates taught this view in their concept of dualism. For them, death is a happy moment because it marks the moment when the soul is finally freed from the pain, imperfection, and decrepitude of the body. It marks the beginning of the immortal soul’s eternal life of bliss.

Spashing into Summer!

Hi everyone.   

Our summer season is here and already filled with an abundance of our favorite fruits!   The Swiss chard is overflowing, the tomatoes are flowering, and the basil is bountiful!    We have also begun harvesting the onions and sharing the cured garlic with carrots to be pulled up soon!  Our final harvests and beds of beets, turnips, lettuces, peas, strawberries, and broccoli, will be soon replaced with peppers, eggplant, beans, sweet potatoes, and more tomatoes.    

Our planting at the 1^st annual Wellness of Chatham Health Fair in Pittsboro this past month enabled us to share seeds of garden blessings and health awareness to all those who attended.   Our Mother’s Day Flower Sale harvested many donations for our garden as well.  Thank you everyone for your continued help and support!

We begin this month with our summer nutrition series, “Cooking, Canning, and Planning with the Garden of Concord”.    Beginning with PIZZA NIGHT on Friday, June 22^nd we will share in fresh ideas as we enjoy cooking (and eating!) our garden veggies by using an assortment of Pampered Chef products led by Debbie Cook.  More info and dates to follow. 

As the temps heat up, we will be cooling down on Tuesday nights as we resume our “Water Fun Nights” from 6-7 with slip-n-slides, kiddie pools, and lots of giggles!  If anyone has any water play toys, pool, slides, etc. to share, please let me know!

We are also beginning “Tasty Tuesdays” this Tuesday, June 5^th which will continue on the first Tuesday of every month.  We invite anyone interested in “trying out” the garden for an evening and/or anyone wanting to share in our harvest.  We praise God for the abundance in blessings and fruits He has provided our community garden and wish to share His love with many!   “Taste and see that the Lord is good!”  (Psalm 34:8)

Our next Garden Advisory Board meeting is scheduled for Monday, June 11^th at 7pm.  Anyone interested in sharing seeds of ideas and helping them grow is invited!

Come grow with us this summer…it WILL be good!

-Donna Poe

Garden Coordinator

Amazing new garden video!

Check out our new video shot on location with actual garden members (not actors:)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCQUVMoZ4YA
It WILL be good!

Thanks Cat Newsome for putting it together!

What is growing in our garden this month?

Greetings Gardeners!

Our garden is growing and filled with an abundance of God’s Goodness!  Despite the heated temps, our spring veggies are still prospering to include plenty of spring mix, Romaine lettuce, spinach, strawberries, and radishes.  We have begun harvesting our garlic and turnips and soon to be sugar snap peas and beets.  Our potatoes are doing great along with recently planted Chinese cabbage, leeks, celery, peanuts, Swiss chard, basil, tomatoes, flowers, and popcorn with our melons and squashes to be transplanted to the garden soon.

Our Food and Faith Bible study which began and concluded this past month provided many blessings to all who attended as we nurtured our minds, hearts, and bodies with God’s wisdom, food, and fellowship.  Many thanks to Daniel as he helped us to be ever so thankful to God for all He provides to include our garden in harvesting food for many and planting the desire to work and take care of His creation through the watering of His love to our community. 

Mark your calendars for Saturday, May 19th to attend the Wellness of Chatham Health Fair

at the Mary Hayes Barber Holmes Park in Pittsboro. The event runs from 11am-2pm… a day filled with lots of family fun as we join other groups/businesses in reaching out to many in healthy lifestyle and food awareness.   

Our Mother’s Day Flower Sale will be on Saturday May 11^th as well as on Mother’s Day, Sunday, May12th. An assortment of lovely 4”potted plants wrapped and with cards will be available for purchase at the garden on Saturday and in the Concord Café on Sunday. The suggested donation is $5.00 each.  Pre-orders are welcomed!  Thank you everyone for your continued support towards our garden!

Come grow with us…It WILL be good!

-Donna Poe

Garden Coordinator

Because of Him, it WILL be good!

Hey everyone!

Hoping the rain on Saturday came as a blessing to all of you in possibly needed rest and catching up on indoor activities (I am now caught up and ahead in my school work AND the house is clean!)

This week, we will have extended garden hours 5-dark on Tuesday and Wednesday to get caught up and ahead of our plantings AND to finish cleaning up the beds and walkways. We will be working on planting our potatoes (finally!), along with some more onions, carrots, and spring mix. Children are invited to plant with their parents their seeds of Easter egg radishes and purple carrots! We will be harvesting more kale, some spinach, scallions, a few sprigs of asparagus, herbs, eggs, and a special treat for our kidz!

In reverence to our Lord and the events leading up to His crucifixion, we will not be working in the garden on Thursday or Saturday. The garden will, however, be open from 8-10am on Saturday for anyone wanting to spend some time in silence and prayer. We will have chairs set up around the prayer garden on the West side of the garden and on the East side around the cross. Please also consider visiting the Stations of the Cross inside the sanctuary which is a series of images with scripture readings regarding the events of our Lord's journey to His death.

Hoping many of you can join us Tuesday and/or Wednesday and I pray you will consider spending some time on Saturday morning with our Lord in His garden.

Because of His love and sacrifice for all of us, it WILL be good!