RE: The Holistic Church: An Idea Explored
Fabulous post, @nateonsteemit, and I agree wholeheartedly.
Where are you located in Texas? If it rarely freezes where you are, I hope you're growing chaya and moringa, which are two of the most amazingly productive and nutritious plants on the planet.
I already knew we were kindred spirits, and this post proves it. When I lived in Florida, I tried to talk several churches into putting in food gardens for the poor, along with offering them plants, seeds and other resources, and would you like to know how many took me up on it? Precisely zero. Sigh.
I also tried to talk numerous businesses into doing same, with one taker . . . Morning Star Fishermen, in Dade City (actually San Antonio), which is the aquaponics company from whom I earned both of my aquaponics certificates.
I gave them a couple dozen chaya cuttings, along with a bunch of different seeds, and the last time I visited, some plants from those seeds were still growing in their main system. The chaya all died though, as they didn't protect them from freezing.
I even tried to talk Pinellas County into allowing me to plant chaya all along the Pinellas Trail, which runs the length of the county, but the usual brainless automatons failed to even come to a decision.
I should have just planted the things and said nothing. They'd be massive by now, and could be feeding lots of people, homeless and otherwise.
All that aside, I also heard of several churches already running church gardens, a few churches encouraging their congregations to "plant a row for the homeless," and one group of churches in the Naples area that had organized and set up an actual food bank, that an elderly lady friend of Marek's volunteered at regularly.
School gardens are another amazing use of previously fallow land, and entire curriculums could be built around what goes on in the garden, especially with the addition of permaculture, chickens, and/or an aquaponic system. They could literally be teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, history and much more, as it relates to what they are seeing in the garden.
Talk about getting kids excited about learning!
Montessori has already done some of this, and Morning Star Fishermen has a grade school curriculum available which relates to aquaponics. It is entirely doable.
We're in wise county an hour north of Fort Worth. It does freeze here yearly, though not as bad as other places. Zone 8a, which I think is down to 10°F.
I do keep returning to the educational benefits of such things too! Kids could learn about all kinds of natural processes when it was incorporated into homeschool programs! There could be farming courses too, that could help the kids learn business skills before graduating.
Lots of potential!
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Absolutely!
Hell, I was still in high school when I remember talking to my mom about the possibility of using an organic farm and orchard (in the days before I'd heard of forest farming or permaculture) as a staging place to teach marketable skills to at-risk kids, and people coming out of jails or prisons.
And I actively tried to find partners in Florida to provide a small aquaponics system to individuals and families coming out of shelter situations.
Unfortunately I was unsuccessful, but it is still something I'd like to take part in, as if you give people a viable way to feed themselves well, and teach them the skills to do so on an ongoing basis, you give them basic skills with which to at least augment if not replace and increase their income, and a way to improve their lives and health in a real and meaningful way.
There is so much that could be being done, without spending a fortune, and if these things occurred to me as a teenager, what the heck us our government's excuse?
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We're in Zone 7a, so colder than you, but you could definitely grow chaya and moringa with winter protection.
Not to mention a zillion or so other amazingly nutritious and beneficial plant foods.
My dad was born and raised in Honey Grove, in Fannin County, which is about twenty miles due east of Paris, so a similar climate to yours.
And my eldest sister still lives in a Houston suburb.
This past winter was by far our warmest since we've been here, with a low temp of 14 degrees, but in the three previous years the low temp was minus 3. Brrrrrr.
Too cold for this Sunbelt kid. ;-)