Lessons From The Garden

Gardening, Backyard Chickens and Beekeeping During the Season of Covid-19 / Coronavirus

March 27, 2020 by Cathi Leave a Comment

How are you doing during this crazy, generation defining time? As for me, I still work full time. My husband and I own a retail, brick and mortar travel agency. This has been my career for more than half of my life. We have built our company through so many challenges. We were here when all of the planes were grounded after 9/11. We have been here through various issues made up by the media. The media lives to create fear in people. They’re pretty good at it.

Nothing could possibly have prepared us for what’s happening now. We have canceled every trip that was supposed to have traveled starting several weeks ago and continuing so far for two more months. Our company supports 15 families. Our employees are the primary breadwinners of their families. And now there is no revenue for at least three months, and it will likely be much longer than that in coming back.

Clearly, this is a very stressful time. But do you know what is saving my life right now? My gardens, my chickens and my bees.

Guess what is happening in the garden, in the pasture and in the bee yard? The same normal things that you would expect to see in late Marchin Texas.

The bees are making baby bees. The chickens are laying eggs. The garden is coming to life. The sun comes up, the sun goes down, the world keeps spinning.

So, I’ll keep starting seeds. I’ll keep building new chicken coops. I’ll still marvel at the bees and mostly try to stay out of their way.

What’s keeping you sane right now? Tell me in the comments.

A Garden That Is Changing The World

January 19, 2019 by Cathi Leave a Comment

One thing I learned working at the farm is that I am glad I bought a wheelbarrow that has two wheels. Those one wheeled ones are too hard to manage!

Dallas Texas is a city normally associated with BIG. Big buildings, big hair, big personalities, big money. Everything is bigger in Dallas.

There is, however, a small forgotten corner of Dallas southeast of downtown. It’s called “Bonton”. Associated with high crime, sickness, with only difficult access to healthy food, this neighborhood has been the very definition of hopeless. Bonton is filled people impacted by generational poverty.

Recognized as a “food desert” by the USDA, people who live there can either spend all day on public transportation only to buy as much food as they can carry, or they can can buy whatever is available at “Big Daddy’s” or one of the other three small beer markets in the neighborhood.

As a result, people experience dire health consequences. They have more than double the rate of cancer, stroke, heart disease, diabetes and child obesity. Men in Bonton live 11 years less than average men in Dallas County. All of this as a result of a lack of access to healthy food.

Through a crazy series of events that you can read about in this article, Daron Babcock decided to plant a garden and change the world. Or at least change the world for Bonton.

Bonton Farms is an urban farm. Y’all, it is my idea of heaven. I got to volunteer there last Saturday and it for sure will not be the last time. I’m already signed up to go back in February. Through Bonton Farms, local residents have access to healthy food and much more. I think these words painted on the wall say it well:

If you’re anything like me, you’re wondering how you can help support the amazing work going on there. You can certainly sign up for a “Service Saturday” and come get your hands dirty. Bonton Farms also has a program called “Friends of the Farm” where you commit to a small monthly amount with which to support them. I just signed up. (Insert obligatory comment about how many Starbucks runs equate to the amount of money in question.)

You can also support the farm by eating at the cafe or shopping in the market. You can also visit their booth at the Dallas Farmers Market. At the very least, go follow them on social media. Facebook Instagram

What’s the big deal about local food?

November 3, 2018 by Cathi Leave a Comment

Why should you even care where your food comes from? Who cares if it’s from down the street, or across the globe? Don’t we live in a modern age filled with conveniences? What difference does it make where the food I eat comes from? As it turns out, it makes a big difference.

You don’t have to look very far to find another article about greenhouse gasses and climate change. Regardless of what you believe about it, certainly it makes sense to be good stewards of this earth. Does it make more sense to eat what is already in our local area, or to use a finite resource (fossil fuels) to move it across the country or the globe so you can have save a little bit on a cantaloupe?

Anyone who has ever compared the flavor of a homegrown tomato to a store bought one can tell you that the flavor isn’t in the same ballpark. Fruits and vegetables allowed to ripen on the plant and eaten closer to harvest time will always taste better than those picked well ahead of time to allow for shipping time.

Not only will local taste better, but will also be more nutritious. The longer a plant is able to mature, the more nutritious the harvest will be. Also, as soon as you harvest, nutrition starts to be lost. The sooner you eat it, the better. When it grows closer to you, this is easier.

When you seek out and support local food, you support the local economy. Rather than sending your dollars to a far away mega corporation, support that sweet family 20 minutes from your house who lives on a few acres and is trying to make a living with some chickens, some fruit trees and a few gardens. Speaking of a few across close to your house, don’t you want to play a part in preserving some land near you that is neither a parking lot or a strip mall?

The fact is that you vote with your dollars. You get to vote every day what kind of world you want to live in. Every one of your dollars supports something. You get to choose what that is. Be mindful about what sort of world you support with your spending.

So what steps can you take to put more local food into your life? We are all so accustomed to being able to eat whatever we want, all year long. We also want to be able to go to one big supermarket and get everything we need. So how do we start to make a change?

Probably the first step would be to decide to, when faced with a choice, resolve just to make the better choice. While you’re at that big grocery store, eat the food item labeled to have been grown in your state. Or, eat what’s in season rather than those grapes flown up from South America in January. Become familiar with what is in season in your area during each month of the year so yu can make smart choices.

Try a short term challenge. The Living Homegrown podcast recently aired an episode with Andrea Bemis where they talked about a Local Thirty Challenge where you commit to eating only local food for thirty days. If you don’t feel you can do thirty whole days, then do a week. Can’t commit to only local everything? Then commit to just local produce. Just try something. Start with a small change and see what happens.

Finally, support agriculture in your town and neighborhood. Do you live in an HOA? Start a movement to allow Backyard Chickens. If you want local food, you need to be willing to see it being grown. What does it hurt for attractive food crops to be grown in landscape beds in the front yard? What does it hurt to have a couple of chickens in the back yard? Support your neighbors and their steps toward sustainability and away from dependence on the industrial food system.

Seven Reasons to Love Gardening

October 12, 2018 by Cathi Leave a Comment

Gardens make you more mindful. When you’re outside pulling weeds you can only go so fast. You can’t text, or Facebook or send an email. You can listen to a podcast though, which is great. :-).

Being outside tending to your garden on a regular basis also makes you more mindful of the seasons. Something I hear a lot is about how certain locations don’t have four seasons, or that a particular season is very short. Here in Texas, for instance, people are constantly saying that it goes from too hot to too cold in just a couple of days. It simply isn’t true. Most people go from inside their homes, to their cars to the mall or to their offices. The weather just isn’t in the top of their minds. So, the one time they go outside they notice the weather and they’ve missed an entire season. When you’re outside more regularly you really notice the difference in weather and the seasons.

Gardens teach you to appreciate your food more. If you ever begrudge the cost of organic produce, just try growing it. All of the sudden getting a zucchini before being overcome by squash vine borers seems like a minor miracle. Not only that, but seeing a perfect tomato, or berry, or leaf of chard is something you truly take the time to recognize and appreciate it.

Gardens make you move your body. When you garden, you spend time bending over working in the beds, carrying heavy bags of soil, moving throughout your garden, pulling on weeds and on and on and on. In most diet and exercise apps, gardening is even listed as an exercise that you can log and get calorie credit for.

Gardens allow you to be generous. When one of your crops are in season, especially if the crop doesn’t lend itself to being canned, frozen or otherwise preserved…or if you simply don’t have the time to preserve it… you can give away the excess to friends and neighbors. Many food pantries will take produce as well. So much of the food in pantries is packaged food, so the people who rely on them don’t get much that is fresh. What a treat.

Gardens are beautiful. I love staring at my garden. Gardens in general catch my eye. I’ve been known to swerve out of my lane when I first encounter a community garden I haven’t seen before. Gardens are just lovely to look at and spend time in.

Gardens allow for lifelong learning. There is always something to learn or improve on. You don’t have to look very far to see something new to try. Just when you think you know how to grow a tomato, you’ll have a season where there is a new pest or a new weather condition that sends you back to the books to research how that leaf looks or why something isn’t happening. I guess lifelong learning is another way to say that gardening keeps a person humble.

I know these reasons just barely scratch the surface of the reasons to love gardening. Why do you love gardening? I’d love to hear in the comments.

Life Lessons From The Garden – A Tale of Two Peach Trees

July 26, 2018 by Cathi 1 Comment

I’m convinced that there are so many life lessons to be learned by observing the garden.

Last year, I planted two peach trees. They are two different varieties, but I couldn’t tell you right now what they are. I think I saved the tags from the trees. Anyway. They are about 10 feet apart from each other in my yard. One is slightly shaded by the house during part of the day.

This Spring the less shaded tree had a TON of blossoms on it. I was SO excited. The one nearer the house had hardly any.

As the summer marched on, tiny peaches developed where the blossoms had been. I was so excited. Still almost nothing on the other tree.

At a certain point, the little peaches on the one tree just stopped growing. They just stayed little and useless. Meanwhile I noticed a couple of peaches had popped up on the other tree. The peaches on the less fruitful tree quickly surpassed the size of the more fruitful tree. In fact, I got several fully grown and ripe peaches from the less fruitful tree and they were wonderful.

I haven’t gotten a single edible fruit from the tree with more peaches on it.

This got me to thinking. Is it the same with us?

Do we sacrifice actual results because we attempt too much? Would we have better results if we slowed down? Not only that, but might we feel better? Take a look at the two trees. The one that made less peaches looks like a much healthier tree. When it comes down to it, better results came from attempting less.

This is the healthier tree. Less fruit, but they ripened. The leaves are a healthier color and there are more and stronger branches.

This is the tree that had so many fruits. You can see that the leaves are lighter and some of them are clearly struggling from the weight of the peaches.

It’s something to think about.