From tiny seeds: the story of our church garden

Every spring, the garden behind our church begins the same way it always has—with small hands and smaller seeds. Jenny and the Church School children kick things off by planting garlic, carrots, beets, sugar snap peas, nasturtiums, and sunflowers, turning bare soil into a season's worth of promise.

Not long after, the Green Team—this year Jane Shanny, Carol Thornell, Joanne Lynn, and Sue Grim—steps in to round things out with squash, tomatoes, peppers, green beans, basil, and parsley. Between the children's plantings and the Green Team's additions, the garden fills six raised plots: four just behind the church, and two more on loan from Friendship Home.

One of Sue's photos from this year resonates deeply with this work: Joanne's hand, cupped and holding a small pile of beet seeds. Sue says of the image, "While taking the photos and looking at Joanne's hand holding seeds it did make me think about the parable of the sower, about how the seeds we plant can lead to results that can help people and help the church to grow."

And they do. Each week, whatever the garden yields is harvested and delivered to the Norwell Food Pantry and a local homeless shelter, so that families in the community have access to fresh, healthy vegetables.

This group of gardeners keep at it because they love it—there's real joy in planting, in watching things grow, in letting children discover that a tiny seed can become food on someone's table or flowers in someone's yard. But they also keep at it because they believe providing fresh produce to neighbors who might not otherwise have access to it is simply another way of doing God's work.