Gardens grow more than food...

Gardens aren’t just a place to grow food for our tables or flowers to make our yards pretty. At the beginning of time, God designed life to be centered around a garden. These vibrant spaces are homes to countless creatures who are constantly feeding off one another and learning how to care for each other in relationship. Every interaction, no matter how big or small, creates rhythms of ecosystems that regulate our world’s health. As humans we get to partake in as well as steward these rhythms. When we steward the garden well, we are rewarded with beautiful harvests.

Like our gardens, which are in the middle of a neighborhood where real life happens, God has built his home in the center of our humanity—the beautiful, the broken, and the ugly. The LOT Project desires to tend faithfully to our plots that bring life and peace as God faithfully and generously cares for our hearts every day, even if no one is watching, and even if fruit is picked without a hello. We want to grow fruit that attracts the Anderson community to enter beautiful relationship found in our gardens.

Here are a few ways we have experienced relationship this year: girl scouts learned how to plant tomatoes and build bluebird houses; while holding handfuls of dirt and closing their eyes, volunteers let the earth speak; we discovered how ants and aphids weren’t a problem but indicators of something crying for help; we had conversations under our new picnic shelter with neighbors who came to pick tomatoes and cucumbers.