Blessing in the Garden

(Hmm....this is a re-post from last year. I don't know how the system did this. Skip it if you've read this before) Okay, you know how much I love locally-produced food. I am a big advocate of the local farmer's market and backyard gardening. I especially love pulling up grass and replacing it with beneficial plants. Grass is so expensive to maintain, in terms of water usage, fertilizer, and time spent mowing it. I've been teaching some gardening classes to a variety of home school friends and church friends. I think it SO important to know where your food comes from and have control over what you eat. It gives you independence in a way nothing else can. I love it!

Recently I contacted a local garden center in an effort to buy ripped bags of garden soil for a discount. I was informed that they store policy was to never sell the ripped bags of soil because some customers would intentionally destroy the bags and then ask for sa discount. I couldn't believe that! So this company was throwing away all the perfectly usable garden implements. They wanted to donate it to a non-profit group, but didn'thave time to find one. I explained my gardening classes (which are completely non-compensated) and they agreed to let me come twice a week and collect any broken bags for free! What a huge resource! That represents several hundrede dollars of supplies each day we collect from them. I've arranged several volunteers with trucks or trailers to drive down to the store, then I do all the paperwork for the inventory lists, and we fill an entire truck bed with supplies. We unload everything in my garage as a distribution site for the students of my gardening classes. It's really blessed a lot of families, since Central Texas has to have raised beds for gardening. It's extrememly expensive to build the raised bed...not for the wall materials, but for the dirt itself. When we did our first raised bed last year, it was $100 for one 4 foot square garden. Ouch! It's really difficult for most families in our ward to afford the initial investment of starting a garden. I'm really glad I can help get people started...Ithink it's so important for everyone to have some form of food production on their property, no matter what size it is.

This morning we had no volunteer with a truck, so I went down on my own to fill my van with whatever we could fit. There were 5 full pallets of supplies waiting for me! There was no way I was going to make 10 trips to bring all that home! When I arrive home with my first load of bags, I called all my students from the last gardening class I taught. Within 30 minutes, we had a caravan of 4 vans headed to the store. We all backed up and loaded up, and still only fit half of the pile!