By Tashia Toupin
My whole life, I have been blessed to spend ample time outside. My brothers and I were raised in a home where we had church clothes and play clothes. Our play clothes were for serious adventures, full of rips, stains, pockets of treasures, and often covered in dirt, grass, and any myriad of other things. My maternal grandpa loved gardening, and had an epic backyard that was dedicated to growing beans, peas, potatoes, kohlrabi, tomatoes, and award winning gladiolas, to mention a small fraction of the many wonderful plants found at 1059 Coteau Street.
I learnt many life-lessons in the dirt with my grandpa in my childhood. This weekly blog will strive to share some of those insights about the goodness and beauty of our world, nurturing relationships with ourselves, others, and God, and cultivating a reverence for the gift of creation we have been given. I will also be keeping you up-to-date on the growth and progress of my own little seedlings.
One of the final gifts that I received from my grandpa was an assortment of gardening tools and grow lights to start garden vegetables from seeds. This experience has been so foundational in my personal and spiritual life that I want to share this with others. I have started literally hundreds of seeds, tomatoes, squash, cucumbers, peppers, lettuces, and some herbs. These will be available for purchase for the May long weekend for you to take a small piece of this legacy into your own yards.
Each week we will explore one of the lessons learnt from growing-up in the garden, highlight some of the milestones that these seeds are hitting, and we will celebrate the triumph of new life in the Easter Season. I hope that you will join me on this journey. If you have questions or comments about any of the material covered, or would like to share a bit of your own story and life lessons from the garden, I would love to hear them.
Contact me at, [email protected]
