community garden at last!

Community Gardeners!

Spring is coming fast and while it looks like March will be pretty rainy, it’s time to think GARDEN!

…Here is where we stand today…
Jordan has graciously offered the garden space at her house to be used as a community garden space!  It was lying unused for several years and had quite a bit of fieldgrass growing on top of it.
The Canby House has some planting space in front of the house, along the driveway and hopefully in their back field, though it is currently undeveloped.
We’re looking for more planting space!  Do you have a front lawn?  patches between stepping stones?  a windows ledge?

…Progress in the garden…
Gregory, Luke, Bryce, Candice, and Emily helped to remove the grass and turn up the dirt at Jordan’s house to prepare it for the garden.  Luke and Gregory rototilled and now it is just about ready for planting! (Be excited!)
Luke has removed a lot of the blackberry bushes along Jordan’s garage to prepare it for a more manageable blackberry patch for the summer.
Gregory and Luke bought $60 worth of seeds (at 50% off!) and have quite the assortment of flowers and vegetables.
Erin and Lori helped to line out planting beds and started to construct a trellis for growing peas! Gregory and Luke set up an indoor grow light in the basement of the Canby House and started about a dozen different herbs as well as onion starts, peppers, and tomatoes.

…Things that are ready for planting…
Things we can plant outside now: peas and beans
Things we can plant inside now: tomatoes, herbs, onions, broccoli, spinach, squash

…Where YOU start…
In the conversations I’ve had with people, I’m hoping to encourage a system of ‘specialties’ within our gardening crowd.  That is, that if we each bring something we’ve learned to the garden then we will be more effective together.  We can focus on a few things all the while trusting that the whole garden will be cared for.  Don’t worry, you don’t need to be a true specialist at any one thing.  In fact you don’t even need to know anything before you start.  All you would need is an interest and a library book or wikipedia search.  Then teach us what you’ve learned!

Luke and Erin M. volunteered to be our herb experts and are learning as much as they can so we can have a prosperous herb garden
Gregory is focusing on garden planning and proper composting so we can have maximum stength wonder compost
Mark is learning about hops to grow anywhere he can find the space!
Candice is learning about chemical-free ways fight pests and diseases
If you’ve got an interest, shout it out.  If not, come and play anyway!
Send me an email if you’re not able to or no longer interested in gardening, but otherwise, know that we will start calling and emailing people each time we head over to the garden.  And soon things will be rolling so you can go whenever you want!

…Other needs…
We’ve got a good start on the garden so far with enough to start planting before April, but we will be looking for some donations for the rest of the summer.  If you see yourself investing in this garden this summer and want to chip in $10-$30ish that would really help us invest in some more plants, boxes, tools, supplies, and bigger projects to make a really effective garden.  Beyond that, there are some things we are looking to get for free:

scrap wood of ANY sort! – especially for lining planting beds and building a compost system
compost, lawn clippings, leaves
bales of hay
another grow light
LOTS of heavy-duty transparent plastic – for cloches, mini greenhouses
a really big whiteboard/chalkboard
an unused notebook
your plants and seeds
your compost – more on this later
any tools you may have to lend, especially rakes and hoes

Happy Gardening!

Who We Are: Hospitality

The value that I (Bryce) would like to talk about is Hospitality. Of our four community values (growth, collaboration, hospitality, and community relevance), I believe this one is the most tangible, and so I am excited to be able to give you a fairly concrete picture of what we do here to practice hospitality.

Meeting Needs

Often this is as simple as opening our door – to the fridge. Because people need food. I think it is safe to say that we all love food here, and we really like to give it to other people too. So chances are if you’ve shown up here, whether on a Tuesday night or any other time, you’ve been offered food. For example, a couple weekends ago when Noah Gunderson and Garage Voice came to town for some shows, they stayed a night at our house. In the morning they woke up to a full breakfast spread including a huge fruit salad, put together by Candice. There was food everywhere. We love this.

Another basic human need is a place to sleep. We’ve got a library, a living room, and like a jillion couches. I love that when I get up to go to work in the early morning, I can peek into the living room and every once in a while find someone sleeping on a couch. (Don’t worry, I’m not that creepy Eddie guy from Friends) The sweet thing about that is that sleeping on the couch often goes hand-in-hand with a free breakfast.

Safety

The Canby house is a safe place. Here you are welcome, and encouraged to bring your own opinions. I can’t promise we’ll agree with you, but we’ll listen to you and engage with you. I believe and hope that our discussions on Tuesday nights, as well as any other conversations occurring here are safe for you.

I have found the Canby house to be a place that practices health in all aspects of life. We try to eat healthy food. We try to communicate in healthy ways. We try to avoid harmful addictions (Settlers is not harmful, people). And this is important, because we cannot be safe if we aren’t healthy.

Refuge and Rest

While meeting needs and having a sense of safety are important, I firmly believe that following the Christ requires us to give up our securities, and make sacrifices. If we are to minister to other people, we have to make ourselves vulnerable. But there comes a time (or, many many times) in our individual lives when we need to step back, or maybe even run away. The Canby house is a good place run away to.

Clearly, Tuesday nights won’t always be very restful for those of us who tend to avoid crowds. If that is you, I would encourage you to come over on another day. For example, Dominique stopped by the other day after a walk in the park, and Lori Marchuk often stops by to do some homework. Oh, and if you like The Office or 30 Rock, you’ll usually find someone here on Thursday nights. Give it a try.

Preparation for the Journey

My choir teacher in college loved to talk about how we are all on “the Journey”. That is, we are making our ways through life on our own paths. In light of that, no matter where we are, we ought to prepare for where we will be next. Although this isn’t something we are actively doing right now, it is my hope that we can explore how to not only receive people with hospitality, but to send them back out prepared. Sometimes this is as simple as giving someone a good meal and a night of sleep. If you’ve got ideas, I’d love to hear them.

One lesson that I have been taught over and over again this winter is that as humans were are all terribly broken. The implication I’m going for here is that I will not always be a very hospitable person. But as one who considers himself redeemed, I strive with hope to meet a higher standard. In light of that, please come over and give us a chance to minister to you.

Community Discussion this Saturday!

Hey Friends,

This Saturday, March 14, at 7:30pm at the Canby House, we are having the first semi-triannual CANBY COMMUNITY CURIOSITY CAUCUS (clearly). If you are wondering what that means, so am I…but that’s beside the point. What we want to do is have an opportunity for all of us who participate in this community to have a discussion about what we are about and where we are going as a community. And remember, YOU ARE the community.

We have been writing here on the blog about our values (well, we’ve got one out so far…more are coming). These were set out to reflect the things that we already do, the things that we are about now. But one of those values is growth, and the question that necessarily follows that is “what are we growing into?” The face of this community has changed over the past couple of years since it started and even in the past five months since I moved in. And because we all create this community, we want to make sure everyone has a voice in how we will continue to grow and hopefully better serve the needs of you and me and our neighbors and the world as well as to share in creating a vision for our future. So please, please, please, if you have ever had an interest or would like to have interest in what goes on here, come and participate in this discussion with us. To help get your mind rolling for the discussion, stew over these few questions for the next several days:

A. What are you looking for in community? Why do you choose to participate in this community?

B. Who are we as a community? What would you say is our current purpose?

C. Who should we be striving to be? What qualities/ideals do we desire to embody as a community and how might we go about growing into that?

D. What do you want to contribute? What gifts and talents do you personally have to make this whole experiment called “life together” work even better? 

Hope to see you all there!

Who We Are: Growth

We at the Canby House established four community values a few months ago to try to define what we are about.  These were growth, collaboration, hospitality, and community relevance.  I want to write a bit about the first one today and hopefully some others will give their perspectives on the next three.  But today you get Luke on growth.

Growth is difficult to measure or even perceive, perhaps most of all due to the fact that we rarely see it while we are in the midst of it.  It is only when we look back months, sometimes years later that we see how far we have come.  Furthermore, as I have found to personally be true, the best and biggest growth (if quality judgments may be applied to a concept as personal and specific as growth) often takes place in the hardest times of life.

In an internship application that I filled out not too long ago, I was asked to describe the “factors (home, church, school, etc) that have helped or hindered your growth as a person.”  As I reflected on the question, I found that it needed some reframing before I could respond.  Growth takes place in all situations—sometimes more quickly, sometimes more slowly, but it is there.  Rather than growth truly being hindered, it is only modified by difficult situations and may shoot off  in directions that we do not expect.

So, in my perception, to declare that growth is a community value is to affirm, that we are involved in a constant process of change to become more and more who we were created to be and to encourage that process in one another.  The seven of us here are all in different stages of life: a few are just our of college, one is in college, a few have been out for some time; some of us are in “transitional” jobs, some are actually employed in something that fits their life goals; but it is probably safe to say that we are all experiencing some degree of uncertainty about our place in the world and how we should go about living life.  Growth in community is about exploring these puzzles together.   We join together to help one other ask the difficult questions, explore the various answers, work through the tough times, celebrate the good, and most of all connect on a deep level with each other and with our maker so that each day we come to resemble him more.

Life in community hasn’t been easy.  I’ve had to let go of my desires and expectations for the sake of “being who we are” instead of who I want us to be.  But while we most certainly “are who we are,” growth requires that we constantly and simultaneously ask the question, “who do we want to become?”  But that is a question for another day and another post.