Together, Let’s Take Care of Creation:
A Message from Bellarmine’s Healthy Earth Team about Fresh is Better

“Let’s take care of creation, A gift of our good Creator God.”
~ message from Pope Francis on the occasion of Laudato Si’ Week, May 16-24, 2020

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For members of Bellarmine’s Healthy Earth Team – and for many of you as well – reverence and love of creation are a core aspect of our Christian faith. Pope Francis’ urgent call to “care for our common home” sets our hearts on fire. So, in recognition of Laudato Si’ Week, we want to share the story of our main endeavor – Fresh is Better: The Evanston Garden Project.

Fresh is Better began three years ago as a way to build relationships between the largely African-American neighborhood of Evanston and our Bellarmine community. As a foundation for those relationships, we chose home gardening and an interest in increasing access to fresh vegetables in the Evanston “food desert.”
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Evanston residents quickly became interested, whether as new gardeners who had always longed for a plot of their own or as veteran workers of the soil who had grown up with gardens but moved away. In three years, our team, with the help of volunteers from Evanston, Bellarmine, and XU, have built more than 60 garden beds in people’s yards.

We have also built and maintain six beds at the Evanston Recreation Center; helped restore the Holloway Hope Community Garden (where we continue to work); and have organized an annual Plant Sale. We also tend several garden beds at the Nexus Community Garden on the XU campus.

We give away everything we grow, either formally through the St. Andrew’s food pantry (the Episcopal Church in Evanston) or informally, to the friends and neighbors we have come to know. Sometimes, as is the case with Holloway, we simply share the bounty with passers-by who stop to admire the garden!
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As the project has evolved, we have focused on strengthening relationships with the project’s gardeners and the community at large. We provide compost, seeds, plants and, where needed, garden advice and help with heavy tasks like turning soil. Last July, we held a tour for our gardening friends to show off the fruits of their labors and in September, we gathered for an outdoor potluck at the Rec Center. 

We promote the project through the Evanston community newsletter, attend Evanston Community Council meetings, march in the annual Memorial Day parade (giving away plants along the route), and volunteer for community-organized clean-up and beautification efforts. For two summers, we led a children’s garden club.

Several Evanston gardeners have recently joined the Fresh is Better planning team and are launching related projects of their own (a 4-H club, for example). Tim Sundrup (Fr. Eric’s brother) has been a great help this year with donations of lettuce seedlings from O2 Urban Farms, a non-profit aquaponics operation in Cheviot employing adults with developmental disabilities.

​While the coronavirus pandemic has affected our plans – it hasn’t stopped us! Everyone can still garden and we have found work-arounds, including a virtual “Garden Hop” organized earlier this month by Evanston gardener Pat Hunley, available on the Fresh is Better Facebook Page (like us for regular updates!)

Mary Phillips, owner of Holloway Hope, and her famous very long beans

Tim Sundrup planting lettuce at Holloway

Finally, we want to thank you, our fellow parishioners, for supporting Fresh is Better through volunteering, financial donations, and gifts of plants for the annual sale.  The project continues to grow, to build friendships, and to spread joy and beauty because of you.  
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And we invite you to become more deeply involved!  No prior gardening experience is needed!  To join or support the project, please contact Tim Severyn, our Director of Social Mission, at severynte@xavier.edu 

Bellarmine parishioner Stephen Eckart with his new bed at the Nexus gardens

Gardener and team member Antonio Sanders

From Pope Francis’ Encyclical, Laudato Sí: On Care for Our Common Home:

Living our vocation to be protectors of God’s handiwork is essential to a life of virtue; it is not an optional or a secondary aspect of our Christian experience...

​Each community can take from the bounty of the earth whatever it needs for subsistence, but it also has the duty to protect the earth and to ensure its fruitfulness for coming generations.

Newly-built garden bed – Team members, from left, Nicole McCoy, Antonio Sanders, and Florence Niklewski show off handiwork with new gardeners

From Canticle of the Creatures, St. Francis of Assisi

Laudato si, mi Signore, per sora nostra Matre Terra,
la quale ne sustenta et gouerna,
et produce diuersi fructi con coloriti fior et herba.

Be praised, my Lord, through our sister Mother Earth,
who feeds us and rules us,
and produces various fruits with colored flowers and herbs.

 From the Gospel according to John

Remain in me as I remain in you.
Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own
​unless it remains on the vine,
so neither can you unless you remain in me.
I am the vine, you are the branches.
John 15:4-5
 

*Many thanks to Laurie Roche for her work on this project and so many others.