Food and Faith Challenge: Week 2

I'm going to go about the Call to Action a little bit different this week.

•Walk slowly and mindfully through a piece of land that’s important to you.

I'm going to start with a picture. This is part of my land:


I walk through my land on a daily basis to watch things grow. Everyday I walk through my gardens to monitor my plants, pinch a leaf, water here, pull a weed there. This land is important to me. It's been in my family for decades and multiple generations. It has been split, inherited, sold, parceled etc to a form unrecognizable to the original piece but I still have part of it. Most of my neighbors are still family. And this land still grows food for us and noursishes my soul.

The portion you are seeing used to be a fantastic garden when I was a child, feeding several families. Then it was converted to horse pasture for a decade, which is how I used it when we first moved in. We sold our horses last fall for several reasons and this year, we are turning it back into a large garden. I've watched it go from a garden, to green pasture, to snow covered, to barren land and now to rows of seeds and plantings that will soon be food. It's an amazing process and quite frankly more than I can deal with but I'm doing it anyway.

I'm connected to this land in so many ways and I will continue to watch it change and grow and do my best to work with it as much as possible. I don't have a tractor so I had to borrow this one that you see from family to return it to a garden as 3/4 acre is a bit much to do by hand but all the tending? It will be by hand. And I will raise my children here and teach them to watch things grow.

Walk out on a piece of property, even if its a townhome patio and find the simple beauty in nature.

And this? This is good NC red clay with horse manure.