Sparks in the Soil

Faith in the Compost Pile

"Where did you come from? From a putrid drop. Where you are going--to a place of dust, maggots and worms....."

An uplifting piece of scripture, no?  Um...no.  This is a quote from the Pirkei Avot, the classical ethics text of Judaism.  I came across it in the wonderful new Beliefnet blog "Homeshuling," by a Jewish mom who works every day to raise healthy, happy, Jewish kids.

So why did I post the rather revolting quote she referenced this week?  Because she used it as a connection point between the compost pile and the garden, one of the most powerful metaphors of any garden.  The compost pile is rotting death.  The garden is teeming life.  The remnants of the garden become the compost pile.  The compost pile renews the garden. 

What a beautiful cycle, and to think it passes again and again through "a place of dust, maggots, and worms...."

Click here to read the whole Homeshuling post and get a peek at some goodies in Amy's garden.

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Take It All in: Circumambulate Your Garden

We gardeners are generally a contemplative bunch--patient enough to experiment with different groupings of plants, different locations, different varieties.  We're prepared for failure and pretty well versed in how to learn from it.  We can get blissfully lost in yanking weeds or sowing seeds, in thinning seedlings or dividing plants. 

But sometimes, I find that I'm getting too "micro" in my garden--concentrating so fully on the placement of my sage plant that I forget to see how green and lush the whole bed is getting.  God is in the details, to be sure, and there's beauty and meaning in the mindful, "small" time I spend in my garden.  But the real "wow" factor in my garden is the way it is growing and changing even from one day to the next.  That's something I don't want to miss.

So that's why I've instituted a new practice--at least once a day, I circumambulate (meditatively walk around) my property, taking in the big, beautiful picture of all the things that are growing here, feel gratitude for the part I've played in helping them grow, and notice the changes--both good and bad--that these living things are undergoing just outside my door.

I walk clockwise around the house, which became a happy coincidence when I remembered that in Buddhism, sacred sites are circumambulated in a clockwise direction--a nod to the sun's course across the sky.  Traditional Buddhist sites are circumambulated 3 times, but I get enough funny looks from my neighbors already....

If you want to stick to tradition, keep the object of "veneration" (or meditation) to your right.  Walk with slow intention, letting your eyes softly scan the object/bed/plant/bloom/vegetable and just breathing it in.  Let yourself smile if you see something exciting.  Look closer if you see something worrisome.  And then, when you do it again tomorrow, see what has changed.

Most importantly, look--don't do.  Don't yank weeds, don't dig, don't deadhead, don't take any action more complicated than gently touching a leaf or peeking under a blossom.  There's plenty of time for work later--the purpose of circumambulating is to take in your garden just as it is. 

Stay tuned for my next post in which I share the sites I saw on today's circuit. 

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Does Prayer Work on Plants?

My 4 tiny cloned New Dawn roses graduated last week from their zip-top baggie greenhouses to genuine pots of genuine topsoil....in the big scary outdoors! The plants' emergence from the protected cocoon of my living room, and then my covered porch, and now into the sunshine has me excited, proud of them--and a little nervous.

As you know if you've been following this process (re-trace the whole experiment here and here and here.), the rose that I cloned is very special to me, and the parent plant is at a home at which I no longer live.  So there's a "one-shot deal" feeling to the whole thing, like if I do something wrong and lose the roselings, the fat lady has sung.

So given these stakes, I've found myself wandering over to the pots and saying encouraging things to the plants.  I might even call it praying over them.  It goes something like this, "If there's a force out here that watches over growing things, please watch over these fragile stems.  Send their roots down and their stems up. Help me help them. Please."

It's awkwardly said, and probably crazy-looking to my neighbors.  But I'm certainly not alone in talking to my plants--and in the healing-power-of-prayer scientific community, there are even studies that suggest that praying over plants might help them grow stronger.

Consider this from Spindrift Foundation, a research group that studies consciousness and prayer.  Researchers Bruce and John Klingbeil, former Christian Science practitioners who were dismissed from the church because of their research, have done experiments on plants from mung beans to soybeans to mold to yeast, in which a control group was given normal growing conditions, and an experimental group was given those same conditions plus a "treatment" of prayer.

In the mung bean experiment, the prayed-for group of beans showed 85 percent more sprouts than the control group.

I'm curious to learn more about this foundation and their research methods, but meanwhile, do you pray over your plants?  Do you pray to God through your plants?  Have you ever had plant prayers answered?

Sparks in the News!

Faith-based gardeners are getting discovered by the media, and I was thrilled to read (and be quoted in!) this article in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel last week on the expansion of a church garden we know and love around here.

The piece features friends-of-Sparks Candy Evans and Lori Robbins, who have exciting plans to expand the community vegetable garden at their United Methodist congregation in Delray Beach after a first season that yielded donations of around 300 pounds of fresh produce to a local soup kitchen. 

Religion writer Lois K. Solomon writes in the article about the church-membership benefits of gardening, especially notable in this case since it might be argued that the garden saved this particular church from having to close its doors:

The Rev. Linda Mobley, Cason pastor, believes the garden is a nonthreatening way to welcome potential new congregants. Sunday attendance has increased to 165 from about 90 this time last year.

"It's a good vehicle for our people to meet neighborhood people so everyone is comfortable," she said, "instead of walking up to a stranger and saying, 'Can I tell you about my church?'

Click here for the original Sparks interview with Candy and Lori.

And if you're hankering for more spiritual gardener interviews, click here!

A Word About Weeds

One of the most exciting things about our new home is the level, open rectangles of clean grass in both our front and back yards.  Our built-in irrigation system allows us to keep the lawn watered (once the summer rain stopped being an everyday occurrence) and green, even this late into August.

Seemingly overnight, though, an insidious, uninvited guest joined our lawn party - crabgrass.  You know the stuff:

In our old house, our tiny lawn sported plenty of weeds, but there the culprit was clover, not crabgrass.  The clover never bothered me - it's soft, pretty, feather-y, and holds the promise of good luck.  Crabgrass, however, is just plain meeeean.  It grows wide and flat, smothering the happy, healthy grass beneath it.  Then it goes to seed and makes even meaner versions of itself.  Um, like this:

Rob and I spent a couple of hours pulling the stuff by hand yesterday afternoon--in that time, we got about 1/5 of the front yard cleared.  Oy.  'Twas discouraging to gather the spindles of a big clump of crabgrass, hold tight, wiggle and pull it out of the ground, toss it into the pile, and....see that there were still about a zillion clumps left ahead of us. 

But discouragement aside, I had some time during this project (and will again tonight, and tomorrow and....) to contemplate weeds. 

In 2007, while in Cincinnati for a family funeral, I visited The Creation Museum, which is an evangelical Christian museum devoted to proving the concept of "creation science."  Within an exhibit about the Garden of Eden was a series of "before sin/after sin" panels that included this:

 

If you can't read the text, it says of weeds:

"Before Adam's Sin:  No Weeds.  God created a perfect balance in the beginning, as plants produced exactly the amount of food needed by the animals of the earth."

"After Adam's Sin:  Once animals began overproducing to replace the dead and diseased, they would eat too many plants.  So God introduced  overproduction of plants to replace the plants that would be lost.  As a result: 1. Plants struggle against other plants for survival and 2. Plants grow where they are not wanted (weeds)."

Now - a bit of Creation Museum logic is in order.  The museum explains that in the Garden of Eden, only animals and human beings were given "life," not plants.  Therefore, people and animals were herbivores--and because they weren't killing something that was spiritually "alive," there was no death in the world...until Adam's sin.

I am a trifle confused on this point because I thought that when Adam sinned, animals and human beings became carnivores, which begs the question of why they would have taxed the plant supply so as to necessitate weeds. 

Which probably also accounts for the headache that I had when I left the Creation Museum (indulge me another example: if dinosaurs were on Noah's Ark, as a museum diorama depicts, why do they not roam the earth today?).

But if I weed out (har) these dizzying points, I see in the museum exhibit the same question that I was asking myself as I yanked crabgrass in the August sun yesterday:  What are weeds? 

The question is literal, on one level--anyone who's ever enjoyed dandelion greens knows that one woman's weed is another woman's dinner.  Ditto for the happy discoverer of a four-leaf clover.  So who's to say what's an invader and what's a welcome, natural addition to the flora?

On another level, though, the question is metaphysical.  What do weeds, as disruptors of our gardens, lawns, and patios, say about the human ideal of a tamed, controlled living space?  Is it a fool's errand to try to rein in nature by eradicating weeds?

The Creation Museum's answer is that weeds are simply a consequence of human sin--aggressive punishers that are our responsibility to defeat.

My answer is different--weeds are reminders.  They're reminders first and foremost that nature is bigger than our desires for order and cleanliness.  They're also reminders that it's our job to protect the earth on which we live, eat, and play--I don't think we have to defeat the weeds, I think we have to protect the grass.  Finally, weeds are reminders that the only way to get rid of bad stuff is to put your back into it and yank it out of your life with all your strength.  This task might take awhile, but it is always emminently worthwhile.

If you're more interested in how to win the battle over crabgrass than why it's there in the first place, here are some organic lawn care tips:

1.  Use corn gluten as a pre-emergent weed killer plus fertilizer for your lawn in early spring.

2.  Dig out crabgrass after it's died off from the first frost in the fall.

3.  Seed your lawn heavily in the fall to fill in the holes left by crabgrass.

For more organic lawn care tips, refer to this helpful Sparks in the Soil guest post from this past spring.

And please share - in your opinion, what are weeds?

Flowers for the Virgin Mary

Have you heard of a Mary Garden?  I just came across this fascinating article on the history of gardens teeming with flowers that all have associations with the Virgin Mary, and I can't wait to learn more.  Here are some historical tidbits before you click over and read the whole thing:

"St. Benedict had a rose garden ("rosary") at his monastery in the 4th c., but the first garden we know of that was specifically dedicated to Mary was one created by the Irish St. Fiacre in the 7th c. The earliest record of a garden explicitly called a "Mary Garden" involves a fifteenth century monastic accounting record of the purchase of plants "for S. Mary's garden" by the sacristan of Norwich Priory, in England."

For those of you wondering how to start a Mary garden in your home or Catholic churchyard, here's a beautifully listed floral inventory to get you started:

"Picture her eyes (Forget-Me-Nots), her hair (Maidenhair Fem), her five fingers (Potentilla). Think about her apparel: her smock (Morning Glory), her veil (Baby's Breath), her nightcap (Canterbury Bells), her gloves (Foxglove), and her shoes (Columbine). Remember her attributes: Mary's humility (Violet), the fruitful virgin (Strawberry), Mary's queenship (Virgin Lily), Mary's Flower of God (English Daisy), Mary's glory (Saint John's Wort), and Our Lady's Faith (Veronica).

Think about her life: The Bethlehem Star (Bellflower), the Christmas Flower (Poinsettia), Lady's Bedstraw (Dianthus - Mary used bedstraw to prepare a bed for Jesus), the Epiphany flower (Chrysanthemum), the Flight into Egypt (Fig Tree - legend says that the Holy Family ate the fruit of this tree during their flight into Egypt), Our Lady's Tears (Lily of the Valley - tiny white nodding bell-shaped flowers can be likened to a train of tears), Our Lady's Tresses (Asparagus Fern - legend holds that at the foot of the cross, Mary, in. deep agony, tore out a tress of her hair which Saint John preserved), Mary's Bitter Sorrow (Dandelion), and the Assumption (Hosta - Plantation Lily blooms at the time of the Feast of the Assumption)."

Do you have plants in your garden that have religious significance?  I know there are flowers associated with various Catholic saints, but I wonder if other faiths have similar floral connections?  Or, are there plants (like my New Dawn rose) that have spiritual--but not religious--meaning to you?

Faith-Based Farm Internships

The deadline for applying to summer internship programs approaches fast, but today's New York Times article on increasing numbers of college students heading to farms for summer internships got me thinking about internship opportunities for people looking for faith-based farming experiences.

Here are 3 that I came across.  Click the links to go directly to the page with application and contact information:

1)  Denver Rescue Mission is a 100-acre working farm that is a residential rehabilitation program for homeless men recovering from drug and alcohol addiction. They seek male interns who want to work with the homeless in a farm setting.  Note the application deadline: May 31!

2)  The Jewish Farm School is offering a weeklong farm-immersion program for college students in Reisterstown, MD from May 31-June 7. "Students will leave with a greater understanding of the complex issues surrounding sustainable food production and the necessary skills, knowledge and resources to affect positive change in their communities and on their campuses."

3)  The Catholic Worker Farm is a great choice for Catholics over 20 who want to travel to England for the summer.  Summer interns work with the destitute women who share the farmhouse on this working cattle farm, helping the farm fulfill its mission of "the Gospel norm to "feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked..."

Have you heard about other faith-based farm internship programs?  Do share!

Garden Gallery on PurposeDriven.com

I'm thrilled to share that an article I wrote on church gardens was published today on PurposeDriven.com, the new website of the author of "The Purpose Driven Life," the Rev. Rick Warren.

My wonderful editors made the article into a gorgeous photo gallery of faith-based farmers in urban, rural, and really rural areas.  Please check it out to catch up with some who have been featured previously on Sparks in the Soil, and some who I hope to interview here soon!

Click here for the article and gallery.

Here's a taste of the piece, from the introduction:

"In some ways, a garden is the ultimate metaphor for the church—from the imperative to “plant” new congregations to the desire to “grow” in faith. Jesus turned to garden imagery in some of his most important parables—the mustard seed and the sower in search of fertile ground. Like faith, a garden must be planted, cultivated, kept clear, and tended daily. Both require hard work. Both carry nourishing rewards."

How to Green Your Church Lawn

Courtesy of the inspiring Katherine Abbott, here are 8 tips on how to make your church, synagogue, mosque (or school, town hall, or residential) lawn into an organic paradise.

To make a church or temple lawn both aesthetically pleasing and absolutely safe to walk and play, adopt these key organic practices:

1.    Use organic fertilizer.

2.    Reseed often so that grass can out-compete the weeds.

3.    Mow relatively high so that established grass can shade out weed seeds.

4.    Use corn gluten in late March, early April, as a pre-emergent weed killer.

5.    Hand weed, possibly using students as summer help.

6.    In Fall, when crab grass, an annual plant, dies at the first frost, dig it out and sew seed of desirable grass, which is a perennial.

7.    For grub problems, use milky spore or nematodes.

8.    Water longer but less often to quench deep grass roots but discourage weed seed growth on the surface.

(image via: http://www.idletype.com/index.php/image/grass/)

Why Houses of Worship Should Practice Organic Lawn Care

Today, just in time for Earth Day, an inspiring guest post from Katherine Abbott, whose faith-based environmental work with her Catholic community and interfaith groups in New Jersey is a model of thoughtful, spiritual eco-activism.  Read on for Kathy's persuasive insights, and you'll be moved to make the land on which you worship into fertile ground indeed.

Organic Lawn Care: What God Intended for Houses of Worship
By Katherine Abbott

That houses of worship should use organic lawn care should be a foregone conclusion. But it is not for most people. Why?  Because herbicides and insecticides, commonly grouped together under one term—pesticides, are largely invisible, are legal, and have no immediate adverse human health effects.  Yet there is much unadvertised scientific evidence that these poisons bioaccumulate and harm people, especially children, in the long run. 

I have great hope that people of faith, who are accustomed to learning about the powerful, invisible presence of the spiritual world, will come to understand that the hard-to-see presence of pesticides on their outdoor spaces work contrary to our physical health and the health of the interconnected life systems God made.

The main thing to know is that pesticides disrupt the cycles of renewal that are part of God’s elegant, waste-free design for nature.  In an organic lawn, the soil is alive.  The dirt is teeming with micro-organisms (again, the invisible) and insects such as worms, beetles and centipedes, that make the soil fertile for plant life.  Micro-organisms and soil-dwelling insects eat organic matter, such as mulched up leaves, or organic fertilizer pellets, and then they excrete nitrogen and other nutrients that the grass needs to grow.

What conventional weed killers and insecticides do, besides killing their target weeds and problem insects such as grubs, is kill or reduce the organisms in the soil.  Those benevolent organisms don’t get a chance to make their natural fertilizer, and so the natural cycle is broken. In its place, marketers have substituted a cycle of synthetics. As long as someone buys and applies synthetic fertilizer, the grass still grows, but the lawn is no longer non-toxic or self-renewing.

The pesticide/synthetic fertilizer cycle spreads waste and toxins near and far from our individual lawns:

1.    Synthetic fertilizer is made from petroleum, so it has a large carbon and pollution footprint.

2.    Synthetic fertilizers and pesticides tend to run off into storm water and contaminate the local drinking water.  Just read your local water company’s water quality report. “Pesticides” and “Nutrients,” are two of the contaminant categories they have to check for, though not all pesticides are tested for.

As for direct effects on people, scientific studies have linked long-term, low-dose exposures of pesticides to childhood cancers, adult cancers, fertility dysfunction, brain growth abnormalities and learning disabilities.  Herbicides, such as 2-4 D, the chemical most commonly found in Weed and Feed, commonly work by interrupting hormonal cycles in weeds.  Our hormones have similarities to hormones in plants.  Many herbicides act as estrogen mimics. Insecticides, the first of which were developed from wartime nerve gas products, generally attack the nervous system of insects. For technical studies of pesticides and health, a good place to begin is www.beyondpesticides.org

Precise causality of health effects of pesticides is always hard to prove without a doubt, because pesticide body burden accumulates in small doses over months and years. To illustrate, some pesticides are labeled “carcinogenic” in Europe but only “probable” carcinogens in the U.S.  Only absolute proof gets a product taken off the market.  The U.S. Fish and Wildlife service, working lower on the food chain, has had an easier time proving that pesticide pollution in waterways causes fish and amphibian malformation or infertility than the Environmental Protection Agency has had in proving that pesticides hurt humans.

Since we know that God made our bodies from the biblical “clay” of the earth--the same carbon, water and other matter of the biosphere--red flags should go up when we encounter evidence that pesticides unnecessarily poison any of life’s systems. Though most of us are not using lab equipment to scrutinize how synthetic pesticides or fertilizers affect human cell structure or blood chemistry, we can certainly realize that God set our normally imperceptible body workings in delicate, mysterious balance.

Organic lawn care is available to us as a way to tap into God’s clean, complex, and practically invisible presence in the sustenance of grass and people.  What house of worship would knowingly accept anything as overly simplistic and full of collateral damage to us creatures and creation as lawn pesticides?

Katherine Abbott is a mother and environmental activist.  She was one of the founders of the NJ Catholic Coalition for Environmental Justice (NJCCEJ) and chaired its 2003 and 2005 NJCCEJ statewide interfaith conferences on the environment. She also served for six years on the Board of GreenFaith. Currently she is Vice Chair of the Chatham Township Environmental Commission, Chair of the Environmental Stewardship Committee at St. Patrick Catholic Church in Chatham, and a member of the NJDEP Environmental Justice Advisory Council.  Last year she renovated her home with “green” building features.