Garden Preparations
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
4/24/08
Today is the day we have been looking forward to for several weeks, the ground breaking day for the YF garden; the hours of planning are ready to be set into action. The Lord has given us a perfect evening to break the ground for the garden. I can almost taste the fresh vegetables in my mouth that we are going to grow. Everyone is excited to gather around in fellowship and have the opportunity to be with other young Christians and talk about the Lord and His Word, with the bond of love for this Message. Many of the young people have spent their time researching gardening methods and learning about how to grow vegetables. In this electronic age, for many youths gardening is a new experience.
As we drew nearer to one another to begin the breaking of the ground, we asked Brother Joseph to lead us in prayer to dedicate the garden. What a blessing it was in how the Holy Spirit’s presence was so strongly felt amongst us, as he dedicated the garden and we put our licks of fire together to speak to our Creator.
4/25/08
Early Friday morning we started the renovation of the quarter acre lot for our garden. After some coffee and donuts, we carefully plotted the
dimensions for each 28 5’x20’ , 8 partial beds and two quarter circles as we prepared to remove the sod from each one. With two brothers on the sod cutters, and others behind them rolling up the fresh cut sod and removing it from the beds, we quickly made progress. It was not long before we had all the beds stripped of their sod and were ready for the next task. We then went from each garden bed and made sure each one was accurately squared off. While all this was taking place, we had several dump trucks unloading fresh compost topsoil to our garden site, for a total of 64 yards. We will place this on top of the garden beds after they are tilled. We plan on tilling the ground soil 8-12 inches on Saturday and then placing another 8-10 inches of fresh topsoil on top of that. This will allow us to have deep, aerated soil and will enable our plant roots to grow deeper, which will keep them healthier and allow them to produce more vegetables.
After we completed the sod cutting process, we dug up the front entrance flower and herb beds and a few of the vegetable beds. By the time we placed topsoil on our first tilled bed, it was about time to clean up the equipment and call it a day.
4/26/08
This morning it rained, causing us to cancel our early breakfast plans and early work since the soil was too wet to dig or to do any work with. As soon as the soil was dry enough , we gathered our crew and started our exertion for the day. Our topsoil was already delivered earlier so we were ready to spread it among our 36 raised beds. It was hard work. As our day progressed along our bodies were getting worn out, but the visualization and excitement of our plans being nearer to completion lent us more energy to continue on. We sang and worshiped the Lord with old time simple gospel hymns. Being outside working in the Lord’s soil gave us such a satisfaction. We worked from noon until dark knowing that the preparations for our garden needed to be completed soon. At the end of the day we left with a sense of accomplishment of all that we had gotten done.
