Growing real food is a beautiful thing. It’s humbling and strengthening. It can soften a heart while building endurance. Gardening can teach you things without saying a word. It can be a healthy healing use of time and energy to produce more than food, flowers and vegetables. Being in creation listening to birdsongs while you water or plant something – hands in the soil tending the plants and watching them spring up and turn into food or greenery is amazing.

From the space prep, digging, watering, heavy lifting, monitoring, weeding, transplanting, composting, and everything else involved in tending to the land (or pots) and what springs from it, gardening is good for personal growth as well as physical, emotional and mental health. Because it can be such an interactive experience, there’s plenty of time to pace thoughts while taking care of plants and enjoying the many beautiful moments within the timeline of their growth in front of your very eyes and even while you sleep. Depending on how you pace yourself on any given day, gardening or farming can be relaxing, creatively stimulating or physically muscle-building that can leave you pleasantly tired and content at the end of the day.

Why grow food?

Aside from the global ‘timeouts’, fluctuating and looming curfews, rising cost of living (especially in Barbados), inflation, food shortage and famine warnings, ‘decaying of the dollar’, outdoor outbursts, public transportation challenges and the constant quest to find legit organic produce that all make venturing outside a lot less appealing in this season, gardening is healthy for the mind, physical movement and our meals. It’s strength-training on many levels and can help us develop a heightened sense of patience, proactivity, well-being thankfulness. Planting and spending time with trees and plants can enhance our quality of life and if we grow even part of what we eat, we are aware firsthand of how it was grown and handled and the mood it was produced with. It takes work and love but when you approach doing it with a healthy mindset and realise it takes vigilance you’ll find gardening can add to your overall well-being, especially amidst all the stressors of today. Spending time with hands working in the earth on many a quiet morning has been a big part of how with the help of the Most High, I have overcome some tough seasons. Even the basic sense and science of breathing in aromas from fresh herbs and flowers and re-calibrating our eyesight by observing creation’s colours can brighten a mood in real time.

Get steps to start growing food at home here.

Gardening & Life

Just like in life, patience has a chance to flourish if we choose to let it, there’s something new to observe or be thankful for every gifted day and yuh got to be vigilant warding off the kinds of weeds and pests that seek to stifle plants’ growth yet demand space and try to test your resilience. Gardening has its highlights and disappointments, missteps and sweet surprises. Endurance is key and thankfulness can stir up the bounty. The health of the soil a seed or plant grows in matters as much as what springs from it yet food and flowers can thrive in conditions that remind us miracles are possible and as fruitful as our faith.

The fact that fruits, veg and provisions come with seeds or stalks that you can plant again is yet another miracle. Farming and gardening is hard work…it’s also refreshing, energizing, peaceful, muscle-building, therapeutic and educational. You learn to be more patient yet still vigilant and when you make a meal with what you grow, it’s a beautiful feeling that’s hard to put into words…but here it is in a song I wrote and recorded about growing food. It’s called “Plant Up The Land” and the music video is now up.

Grow something – even if that starts with scraping salad leftovers into a container of earth or hovering the cut base of an onion or sweet potato over a glass of fresh water…is a chance to witness a miracle in motion and observe the way even plants respond to care.

“Plant Up The Land“ from my new album “Kingdom Call” is now available here.

Growing and Storing Food At Home by: Julia Benn (Guest Post)