The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature.
To nurture a garden is to feed not just on the body, but the soul. – Alfred Austin
A garden is a grand teacher. It teaches patience and careful watchfulness; it teaches industry and thrift; above all it teaches entire trust. – Gertrude Jekyll
After mooting the idea earlier this year, we finally arrived on the day of The Big Dig for our “BLC Community Garden”!
The BLC Community Garden was mooted as an idea to utilize the space we have to plant herbs and vegetables (to start with) to bless the community, within BLC and beyond.
We hope the harvest from our garden can become a blessing to members of our Church (taking home some fresh herbs after service on Sunday for dinner!) and to the community around us (whether it is our neighbors opposite us – or even beyond: anyone who could use some fresh vegetables!). The BLC Community Garden is all about learning how to be Christ-followers TOGETHER – planting a community garden, we think, is one of the most creative, fulfilling, and relationship-building ways to do it.
We partnered with Eats, Shoots & Roots, a social enterprise with a simple aim: To empower urban individuals and communities with skills and tools to grow their own food, and build a sense of resilience in the city. Eats, Shoots & Roots helped us lead The Big Dig and facilitated informal workshops about the process and techniques of building edible garden beds.
The day started off with a briefing and workshop by Eats, Shoots & Roots. After that, everyone was split into several working teams: one to work on the herb patch, another to work on the vegetable patch, in a “grow tong”. The children were also involved as a team of their own, and also as they helped here and there with various tasks.
After several hours of work, we finally completed building the two garden beds and are looking forward to a harvest soon!
The Grow Tong for our Vegetable Patch
The Herb Patch, built with love, a little bit of OCD, and some anger management 🙂
Today’s Big Dig for the garden is a start of a journey. With the garden underway, we could also explore:
- Enjoying fresh Church/Home-grown groceries
- Workshops on gardening/sustainable lifestyle
- Having Kitchen parties and/or cooking classes
- Inviting friends and family members to hang out at church to co-labour with us
- Having prayer walks in the garden
- Connecting/partnering with other environmental organizations and schools
- Becoming a teaching ground for others – ages kids and up!
We are grateful to have Clarice help us kick off this project, as well as Jason and Rubini for helping us organize today’s Big Dig! We are also encouraged to have a great turnout for today’s event – it was a blessing to meet new friends as well as get reacquainted with “old visitors”.
Here’s to the next adventure ahead with The Community Garden!
More pics from The Big Dig available here.
