On August 15, after the 10th Anniversary SPROUT Garden commemoration during the worship service, coffee hour was a “garden to table” collaboration between the second-Sunday hospitality team, Hamline Kids, the SPROUT Garden team, and the Hamline Church Earthkeepers. The Hamline Kids assembled caprese salad bites (with some assistance/guidance from the Earthkeepers) using locally made cheese, basil from an Earthkeeper’s home garden, and tomatoes harvested from the SPROUT Garden that morning. The trays of local bites were the centerpiece of the coffee-hour spread, connecting the dots between the kids’ Sunday school efforts, the bounty of the SPROUT Garden, and the church’s hospitality ministry.

Why does it matter to add SPROUT Garden produce to hospitality hour? For one, replacing part of our diet with locally grown food decreases the carbon footprint of our consumption. Eating locally means our food doesn’t require extra energy and resources for transportation, refrigeration, and packaging. In this season of the year, we can easily increase how much of what we eat is grown right outside our door, and we should!

Beyond carbon footprint, eating any food we grow with our own hands also helps us better appreciate the other foods we are eating. We understand the work that went into food, the weather and soil conditions that made it possible to grow, and the distance food travels to reach us. Of course we would struggle at this point to source our entire coffee hour from the food grown in 55104. But incorporating some of the sustainably grown food from our on-site garden reminds us that the sugar, flour, coffee, and other hospitality-hour ingredients are also grown by someone, somewhere, at a price.

Eating the food produced by the SPROUT Garden ministry also helps us remember that in God’s creation, everything is connected to everything else, as the Earthkeepers emphasized in a Children’s Story earlier this summer. When we take this concrete step of connecting the food we grow in the SPROUT Garden and the food we eat as.a community on Sunday morning, we participate in a type of communion between the ministries of Hamline Church. We grow as a church when we grow—and eat—food together. Happy Anniversary to the SPROUT Garden!