Gardening

The first thing you should know is that I don’t actually enjoy gardening.

I like gardens. When I was growing up, my mom had tomatoes and parsley, mint and feverfew in small plots kept clear of the zoysia grass lawn. Even today, she tends raspberry plants in both her front and back yards.

Gardens intrigue me. I am glad for them. I may have even thought I could have learned to care for them. This notion may have been in the jumble of motivations that brought me to the Parish Farming Internship (PFI) in 2014. This was “A Prayerful Exploration of Food and Faith,” according to the description written up by Robert and Erin Lockridge, who taught the course.

I knew Robert and Erin from the gardents they tended in the neighborhood and the pay-as-you-can pizza restaurant, Moriah Pie, which they ran on Friday nights. The produce they grew—often in the yards of their neighbors—became pizza sauce and pizza toppings and side dishes: tomatoes, peppers, onions, potatoes, butternut squash, and on and on.

The internship offered a glimpse of the theological underpinnings of their ideas around food, and why they chose to devote months of labor to cultivate vegetables that would be lovingly incorporated into pizzas that customers would pay for with maybe a stack of pennies or a couple of dollar bills.

When I took part, PFI was a three-day intensive (Thursday to Saturday or Friday to Sunday) that met every other month for five sessions, March through November. We had reading assignments—poems by Wendell Berry, essays by William Stringfellow—and reflection pieces to write. When our seven member cohort gathered over long weekends, Robert and Erin prepared most of our meals and made their front room into classroom space for loud, lively discussions. They even offered guest rooms for anyone who wanted to sleep over, though most of us lived within a few blocks of their place. We worked together in the gardens, we worked together to staff Moriah Pie, and we teamed up in twos or threes each session to create what we called a “mindful meal” for the group (with a theme tied to something we were learning). We also had some type of final project to complete, taking the concepts of our parish farming experience and applying them to our non-farming lives.

I did the whole eight-month internship without once mentioning that I didn’t enjoy gardening.