﻿It's important to continue to improve on what God has given us here on the headquarters campus,
because God has inspired everything that's gone on from the buildings, to installing the turf,
to installing the trees, to all the perennials and the flowers that we've installed and that's what
we do here. We keep ourselves busy, maintaining and improving what God has given us. That's our
charge here in the Landscaping Department. We're maintaining, we're keeping it beautiful.
We're no longer in a sense dressing the garden, we're keeping the garden.
We have better machinery, we have better skills, we have better employees over the years. We
have a great crew right now, and everyone is onboard and excited about being here every day.
Working with the staff, working with the volunteers and teaching about God's creation
is truly a great pleasure. A great part that I thoroughly enjoy about my job
on the campus. I'm the manager of the department, but we have other individuals that supervise other
aspects of the workday, such as the mowing or the weeding and other things that go on. I'll relay
information and that can be relayed to the person directly and things get done that way as well.
As we maintain the campus, we learn more and more about God's creation. We all wait the day that we
get to learn every detail about it. One of the things we strive on the campus is to maintain
balance. We all know in our Christian lives, we are to maintain balance and that can be...
we all apply it personally, but we also try to apply that on the campus. We use every tool
available to us through God's creation, to keep the campus looking beautiful,
to keep it looking healthy and to keep it looking the example that it needs to be.
We've been given a beautiful campus and I think about what people think
when they drive by God's headquarters. There's quite a few people that see it from the freeway.
There's people that see it from the grocery store that's nearby and what do they think?
They have no idea that the world will look like that one day, the entire earth. So it's a great
responsibility that we have is to keep it looking that way and to make it look better.
This is the second year we have the Grand Garden and in many ways it's the most exciting, at least
the most exciting for me. The whole purpose of the grand garden is to have a new garden, a new design
every year. From year to year, it's important that we maintain the beauty, but we can change
other things. We can change the overall design, we can change the plants, the colors. The garden
was designed to be a blank slate, a blank canvas. Winter comes, the garden goes to rest and as the
garden goes to rest, the design team gets out the pencil, the paper, and starts planning out, "What
are we going to do differently? How can we add different interests, different variety that wasn't
there the year before?" One of the exciting things is that God has created a vast variety of plant
material, which we can use. We can go dig through catalogs, dig through websites, dig through
piles of information about what plants are available, what plants can be grown, but there are
tens of thousands of different plants that we can choose from to bring variety onto the
campus. Maybe to bring a plant that will attract butterflies. If we can bring in butterflies and
other pollinators, walk the Grand Garden and see more of God's creation than just the flowers.
What better thing can we do? I come from an artistic background and I can appreciate the
work that went into the design. That design is a little more flowing, less hard edges, a little
more organic design, but just as beautiful as it was last year. Because of the pattern
that we used this year, we did curves instead of straight lines. Through many discussions and an
idea that was offered by one of the crew, "Why don't we paint lines out on the Grand Garden?"
And that was kind of a light bulb moment. While if we outline the design of the Grand Garden, we'll
be able to plant it much faster and much easier and with many more hands, all working together.
So as we design the garden, we figure out how many plants we need and we approach a local
grower to make sure that they're the right size. So when we go to plant after the latest frost,
we have already full color going into the garden. Once the plants arrived and with the
layout on the ground, we were able to place the plants quickly and plant it quickly and
have many hands helping us. We were much more efficient with installing the plants this year,
the flowers went in and within a day and a half, we had a beautiful garden.
Each Sabbath, we have an opportunity to walk outside after services and enjoy the beauty.
The whole point of the garden is in a way to showcase God's creation.
To kick off the 2020 Community Garden program, participants gathered for a tour and introductory remarks.
Welcome to Community Garden 2020. One thing that we're excited about, we have such a great turnout
as you can see it tonight. We have many hands and should make light work. There's not one particular
row is yours, not one particular plant is yours, it's all of ours. In years past, we've all had our
separate gardens and sometimes our thumbs aren't as green as we'd liked them to be that year,
but if we're all chip in together, I think we could very easily
keep the garden looking good, looking like the quality that it should be here on God's campus.
Hope you enjoy the evening and we look forward to having the best Community Garden ever here
and I hope you liked the tour. We look forward to a great year. Thanks for coming out. Thank you.
There are various reasons why a community garden is important to have. It gives an opportunity for
the local brethren to get their hands dirty, to maintain watching plants grow and to be able to
pull those weeds that would interfere with their fruit production, just to see the overall garden
expanding and growing on a yearly basis. We spent the winter planning out and designing
a layout for the garden where everyone who wanted to be involved could be involved. In prior years,
we divided the garden into separate plots and everyone would look after their own plot. And
it was successful to a degree. Those that had green thumbs had great gardens. Those that
didn't have green thumbs had interesting gardens. This year, we wanted everyone together. We wanted
to spread the love, spread the experience amongst every team. Well, this year we have installed
a little bit of a different process in the community garden. We have teams and team leaders,
we have a lot of individuals that really never have gardened before and this is an opportunity
for them to be here on the headquarters campus and to enjoy the fruits of their labor. The garden,
the whole garden is ours. It's not just one plot as one team, but the entire garden is,
and that helps us all to learn from each other. Those that have experience are now on a team
with those with less experience and can share their wealth of knowledge with each other.
Those that are new this year, those that have never gardened before next year, they may have
the opportunity to help work with someone that was in their shoes this year. One of my favorite
things about gardening is the opportunity to take a seed, a tiny little seed and put it in the
ground and then you have a certain responsibility. You can't make the plant grow, but you can give
it the perfect soil to grow in, you can give it the right amount of water and the right
amount of fertilizer. And then you can watch that plant grow into something that produces fruit.
It's a joy to go out, to see a garden that looks well and is beautiful and help keep
it that way. And with everyone working together, everyone having the opportunity to fellowship and
be together and be on the campus and to see the fruits of our labors already is a joy.
In God's kingdom, a lot of people that never once stepped foot into a garden,
well, they'll have an opportunity to grow their own food and that will be a vital part of God's
kingdom and that's agriculture. One of the things that we've done for our son is we
planted this small little flower garden, and he has three flowering plants and two foliage plants
that he is responsible for. So every day he has to go out there with his watering can
and make sure they continue to grow and now the flowers are blooming, and he can appreciate
that on a small level. One of the most rewarding things about showing my son how to grow something
is I can see that he's actually learning during this entire process. And he wants to go outside
and water is his flowers. He wants to take care of them. So to see that aspect of the nurturing
of someone that's so young into someone that actually has a skill is a rewarding experience.
To learn more about the congregations of the Restored Church of God, contact us.