Podcast 77: Drop the Seed: Gardening as Spiritual Practice, A Conversation with Libby Clarke

In this episode of 2 Crones and a Microphone, Linda, Betty, and Sally welcome Libby Clarke: podcast producer, designer, artist, teacher, seminarian, and lifelong grower.

The conversation begins in Libby’s New Jersey yard, once a lawn and now a small food forest, and opens into something much larger: gardening as spiritual practice, relationship with place, food sovereignty, humility, seed saving, compost, worm bins, fertilizer tea, neighborhood connection, and the stubborn generosity of the earth.

From champagne raspberries to mugwort, mustard seeds, chard, potatoes, elderberries, and one truly foul-smelling barrel of fertilizer tea, this episode invites listeners to stop treating gardening as a performance and start receiving it as a conversation.

You do not need acres. You do not need perfection. You need a cup of dirt, a seed, and the willingness to begin.

About Libby 

Libby Clarke is an artist, designer, teacher, podcast producer, seminarian, and Creative Director of Stoneroller Cooperative. Her work brings together faith, creativity, accessibility, community, and justice. She lives in New Jersey, where her small yard has become a food forest, a neighborhood conversation starter, and an ongoing spiritual practice.Websites

Stoneroller Cooperative
stonerollercoop.com

Libby Clarke / Creative Work
libbyclarke.com

Everloving Pride
everlovingpride.org

Transcript

Linda: Welcome to 2 Crones and a Microphone. I am Linda.

Betty: I am Betty.

Sally: I’m Sally. And I’m going to point out that we have someone we’re interviewing today, Libby. I’ll let you say hello on your own, Libby.

Libby: I’m Libby Clarke. Thank you so much for having me.

Sally: Betty will take it from here.

Betty: Yes. I feel like I’m at a football game. I started too early.

So, Libby came to us as our producer through our friend Jen. If you remember, Jen did two podcasts for us, Episodes 61 and 63. Libby is married to Jen. They have one child.

Libby: Yeah. Who’s a handful. She’s a good girl.

Betty: She’s a good girl.

Libby has really helped us with the podcast and helped us pull it together. She has taught us a lot about podcasting and how to take the podcast over, which is really great. We’ve all learned so many things.

Her company is stonerollercoop.com. So if you’re interested in engaging with someone who does not give you the fish, but gives you the fishing pole, which I highly recommend, I would definitely get in touch with her. She’s done a great job for us.

Thank you.

There are other things about Libby that you need to know because she’s an amazing woman. I’m going to turn it over to you, Libby. Go for it.

Libby: Thank you. Thank you so much.

First of all, I’ve loved working with you. It’s been wonderful. I cultivate clients. I cultivate friends. I cultivate. That is something we’ll talk about today with gardening.

I believe in a light but directive touch. I think that is a big gift: “Maybe try this. If that doesn’t work, maybe try that.” That applies across all the facets of my life.

I’m an artist and teacher. I’m a designer. I am also now a seminarian. I am a postulant for holy orders to the priesthood in the Diocese of Newark for the Episcopal Church. Hopefully, in three years, I will be a priest.

That is all thanks to Jen. When Jen and I met, I was very grumpy. I was claiming atheism, but I was never truly capable of that.

She went to church every Sunday with our daughter, and I slowly warmed over the years. Look what happened.

Knowing all of you, I’ve known you all for about fifteen years now. Sally, I met you a little later, so maybe fourteen years for you. Knowing you all has been a huge part of my life. It has been a quiet rising and a gentle forming of each other.

I love you all. Thank you for welcoming me here.

Sally: Talk about spiritual journeying and discovering where your path actually leads you.

I know we haven’t designed this podcast to be on that topic, but remember, our whole year has been on the topic of journeying and finding a personal pilgrimage. Everything has been linked into that. I love that you said that, Libby, because it ties into how we’ve tried to approach this year of recording.

Thank you for the nod to that.

I know that wasn’t meant to be our topic for today, but that is a whole other beautiful part of what you bring, not just for yourself and your family, but for everyone who knows you.

Libby: I know we’re talking about gardening, and I was thinking about it all. The ten years I’ve spent getting to know my lawn, because it started out as a lawn and now it’s a food forest, has been a spiritual journey.

It has humbled me. It’s like, “No, you’re not growing that there. You’re growing it over there.”

It has been wonderful. Everything accumulates. People need to realize that those little daily things they do make a life.

My going out into my front yard and watering whatever had managed to grow meant that I talked to everybody who passed by. Everything maps like neurons.

Talking with you all regularly has changed my life. Being with Jen changed my life. We have more power and more connection than we know. I’m realizing that.

I had to turn off my phone because, of course, I’m getting beeps. I apologize. That’s cut off now.

I just wanted to say that before we started formally because everything is connected.

Linda: It is connected. I love that you came in with the word cultivate because cultivate applies not only to agricultural farming, but also to the development of self, the development of others, educational realms. It is about devotion, and I think that is a key element both in the garden and in the way of living a life.

It’s a devotional practice.

Libby: My garden started in full when COVID hit.

When we moved here, we had nothing. I had already started a couple of things, but I didn’t have a practice. Every morning, coming out and watering the garden, weeding, and learning my dirt changed me.

My dirt was mostly clay. I’m in New Jersey. There’s a little bit of loam, but there’s a huge amount of clay and no rocks. I grew up in Rockbridge County, Virginia. I had to introduce myself to every square inch of my yard.

It changed how I metered time. It changed how I spoke to people. I am only now realizing, because of sitting down to talk to you about it, how much planting things, watching them, and taking part in their growing completely changed the course of my life.

Sally: Wow.

I chuckled when you said your garden had no rocks because my garden has more rocks than dirt. It is a huge awareness of why there are so many beautiful rock gardens in the East. Every time we dig, we find rock. We bring rocks up.

Of course, we’re going to edge our garden with all the rocks when we finish it. We’re going to make a rock wall around it because what else do you do with the rocks? There are so many of them.

Betty: Pennsylvania grows rocks. That’s the crop.

Sally: It’s true. They emerge. The rocks come up. We used to talk about that: as you grow things, the rocks come to the surface. You birth rocks no matter where you are, but certainly here. So we have your rocks, Libby.

Betty: Yes. I’m coming. I’m coming. I need your rocks.

Libby: I grew up in Rockbridge County, Virginia, on a family farm. We were subsistence farmers. We had 150  acres and grew almost everything we wanted to eat except bread. We didn’t grow wheat.

We raised all the meat. We raised lots of animals who only had one bad day.

So I had this whole background in it and this relationship with it, but it was much more of a wresting from the earth. It was, “No, we need this. We have to have this.”

To have a more conversational relationship with gardening now has been different. My family does not absolutely depend on my garden. It has been much more of a dialogue.

I’ve let this patch of dirt tell me what I, in my current state, can grow. Right now, it’s horseradish, chard, and anything that bears a berry. Berry plants quiver at my touch in New Jersey. I don’t know what it is.

Tomatoes and I are still talking.

In that sense, it has been much more about being in this time and place. Like I said, my wife and child don’t generally garden with me, but Madelene has woken up almost every summer morning to a bowl of fresh raspberries I’ve grown.

It gets me out of bed even when I’m tired. I go down, pick the berries, wash them off, have them ready, and make sure they’re dry because she doesn’t really like them wet.

That has changed my life all summer long, that I can give my child fresh berries.

The neighborhood kids now think raspberries come in champagne color because those are the first ones that burst on the scene for me. We have a whole hedgerow of champagne raspberries. It has become a fixture.

It has been much more collaborative than my childhood gardens were. Again, it is such a transformational practice to go out and say, “Let’s see what grows.” I sow overhand, and it’s always a surprise.

That cultivation is cultivation of self. It is cultivation of a relationship with a time and place.

I bring in sheaves of chard all summer long. Jen makes chard and potatoes. Who knew? I had no idea you could eat potatoes and chard together.

I can grow potatoes. My record so far was about 75 to 100 pounds of potatoes from about a pallet-sized patch of dirt. We got three plantings that summer because it was such a long summer.

It’s harder with a full-time job, but luckily I work from home now, so we’re going to have potatoes again.

I think what all of this has made me realize is that everybody should know how to grow things out of dirt.

Given how hard things are getting, I can’t wait to listen to your Victory Garden episode because that is a wonderful thing for everybody to do for themselves: to have a relationship with their food, to have a relationship with how the vegetables they eat are grown, to start developing a fertilizer tea barrel, to make their own fertilizer.

We compost. We make fertilizer tea. We have a worm house.

All of this is tucked into these little spaces. We have a tiny yard, maybe a tenth of an acre. But for me, it has become a meditative practice that I have to do every day. I don’t feel right unless I’ve touched dirt and done something. It doesn’t have to be much.

Beyond taking care of ourselves and knowing where our food comes from, this is where we belong.

Linda: Exactly.

Libby: What are we doing inside? Go outside and play.

Betty: All right, I have a question. What the heck is a worm house?

Libby: You don’t know?

Betty: I’m a Brooklyn girl. You forgot Brooklyn. Hello.

Libby: There are red worms that you can buy, different kinds of worms you can buy. Basically, it’s a stacked container. I have a purchased one now, and it’s a little upscale for me, but we’re working with it.

You have a stacked container where you can put food waste. Nothing with meat or anything that would attract animals, but food waste. The worms work it through, and it slowly crumbles down. You gather the worm castings and the worm liquid at the bottom.

It is nuclear-powered plant food.

It processes pretty quickly. Sally, would you say three weeks for it to process from one stage to another?

Sally: It doesn’t take very long. I had one when I lived in Oregon. I had a worm bin, and it kept going.

Libby: I brought it inside the first year I had it and kept it going all winter long. So we had fruit flies all winter long. Poor Jen. My sweet wife put up with this.

She has gone through all my iterations. I had shelves and shelves of seedlings. Now I just throw the seeds out in fall and see what comes up in spring.

I have gotten so much more assured. We try to maximize output. We think, “I need tomatoes the size of my child’s head.” No. Let’s see what grows.

Betty: GMO seeds.

Libby: Oh my gosh. And mule seeds. That makes me so mad.

Linda: We touched on that in our last podcast. It’s problematic. It is not the real deal.

Libby: It totters into blasphemy to me. I don’t use that lightly. There are very few things I call that offensive, but mule seeds, GMO seeds, I’m just like, “Really, y’all? Can we please reconsider this?”

We now have one banana worldwide, one type of banana. It would take one blight, and we would be stuck with little tiny bananas and plantains.

We have gone monoculture on so many core crops. We have made ourselves disastrously vulnerable. I’m speaking off the cuff, and somebody in the comments will probably cite a few exceptions, but still, there are many monoculture crops we need to deal with. We need to diversify. Bring back the heirloom seeds.

One year, I planted a bunch of peas beside each other, and I have my own variety of pea because they cross-pollinated. I absolutely did not mean to. It’s an okay pea. I always plant a few of the old ones the next year.

We are in collaboration with a living, breathing entity upon which we live called Earth. We need to stop acting like we can give it timelines, deadlines, productivity measures, and quotas.

We need to de-industrialize ourselves a little bit.

A yard garden, a little tiny plot of dirt you can scratch, is a chance to do that. Then you can scale up once you get the rhythm. The earth is so receptive and so kind.

Linda: I love the way you talked about that, Libby.

For those listening to this podcast before they listen to the Victory Gardening podcast, because some might be doing that, I talked in there about my grandfather and grandmother. They lived in the city in Cleveland, and half their backyard was a garden.

Most people today would call it a tiny garden, certainly compared to the garden we’re building now, which is much larger. But it was so productive. You can have a tiny piece of land. They had fresh vegetables kind of all year long. They banked things in the wintertime, and they were harvesting in the winter in that cold Cleveland, right-off-Lake-Erie climate.

It is doable. They knew how to do that because they were connected to the earth, which is what you’re talking about.

Libby: The best winter greenhouse I ever had was one of those climbing domes Madelene had. I wrapped it in plastic. It was the best winter greenhouse. I wish I’d kept it.

Now we have a trampoline. I shouldn’t say that because the insurance company might figure it out, but oh well. We have a trampoline, and I’m like, “How can I grow on this?”

A glass box, especially for a small family, is enough. You don’t need acres to keep the flow going.

It’s a daily practice of saying please and thank you.

Please, may I have this? Here is some water. Thank you. I’m harvesting. I’m weeding.

Please and thank you.

The abundance never ceases if you do the work. When people ask me about the power of prayer, I’m like, prayer is the seed. Then you water and tend and give thanks, and look at that: the harvest is there.

That is the relationship with creation that I’m trying to get people excited about. If you participate, it’s amazing. But if you treat it like a one-armed bandit, I’m sorry.

Sally: This is fabulous. I love your emphasis on conversation because that is at the core of what 2 Crones is about: opening up and having that conversation with the earth, with everything around us, with the spirit beings.

You don’t know this yet, but I’m going to tell you that we just decided we’re going to do a third gardening podcast this summer. It’s going to be called “Unseen Helpers in Your Garden.”

Libby: Yes. Oh my gosh.

Talking about how ladybug babies eat all the aphids.

I hope there’s a use for the garden slug because they are actually gorgeous. Have you seen a garden slug up close? I know they’re disgusting, but they are resplendent, just walking around. The slime trail is gross, but I hope they’re useful.

Sally: Libby, I used to drown them in beer.

Libby: Darn. I was hoping there was some higher purpose.

Sally: There were so many of them that you did not harvest anything because the slugs harvested.

You let me know what the use of those garden slugs are. When I was a kid, they came out, and we’d be running outside barefoot, and you’d step on those guys. It was so disgusting.

Libby: Oh my gosh. And salt. There’s always one dog in the house that will try to eat them, and you’re like, “Oh, dear.”

That will be my mission. I’ll probably write it into a blog: the value of garden slugs. There’s got to be something because everything does have a purpose.

Linda: We all know that. You’ve caused me to think. What is the purpose of a garden slug? I’ll have to think about it.

Libby: Everything is here for a reason.

Betty: Well, at least your garden slugs died happy. You drowned them in beer. You were compassionate.

Sally: As opposed to kids. There were so many slugs in the Pacific Northwest, and Cub Scouts would take salt and crumble it on top of them, and then they’d go, “Ew.” They can’t handle that. So we had to have a discussion about murdering slugs.

Betty: Drowning them in beer is really the same thing.

Linda: But they’re happy, right?

Libby: I can’t wait to hear that episode, too.

As I developed a relationship with my garden and with the way people handle growth, every year there’s that lawn-clipping pickup where people throw out hundreds of pounds of beautiful leaf mulch and lawn clippings. Sometimes they’ve sprayed pesticides on them.

I’m like, don’t spray anything. Leave the leaves down. Leave your stalks in the garden. If you do mow your lawn, and you haven’t sprayed it, throw it in a barrel with a mosquito dunk and some water.

You’ll get rid of the mosquitoes, and you’ll make fertilizer tea.

My fertilizer tea started last October. It has waves coming off it. It stinks so bad, but everything loves it. My elderberry plant quadrupled in size. It sat there doing nothing for four years. Last year, it popped out a couple handfuls of berries. Now it’s almost to the railing of the deck, which is a story tall.

It’s going bananas.

Betty: Tell us what’s in your fertilizer tea. How do you make a fertilizer tea barrel? I wanted to double back, but I didn’t want to interrupt our flow.

Libby: I found an old rain barrel somebody was throwing out. It’s a food-safe barrel with a spigot on the bottom.

I rolled it into my yard, put it up, and threw in all my clippings from the lawn. Green leaves. I didn’t put in brown leaves. Sticks, corn husks, plant material, anything from plants that could viably be eaten. I wouldn’t put in poison ivy, for instance.

Then I filled it with water and threw in mosquito dunks or treatment pellets. They don’t harm us. They make mosquito eggs nonviable. The mosquitoes come take a sip, and then that’s a one-generation problem.

It also becomes a mosquito trap, which means your township will probably let you have the big barrel of standing water. Some townships and cities are very sensitized to mosquito breeding grounds, and rightfully so.

I put in a couple of mosquito dunks every month. I empty it out, and this green, incredibly stinky liquid comes out. If you ever grew linen or flax, you have to ret it. You have to rot it, and it smells. I compare it to God’s armpit.

This is fertility.

My poor neighbor has been so kind through the years of cow manure, fermented chicken poop, and everything else. I put this out, and he was like, “Once my eyes stopped watering, it was fine.”

I was like, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

The dogs, for about a week, were like, “What happened?”

But then it faded, and everything exploded. The berry bushes exploded. We also had a really hard winter, which we hadn’t had in a while.

Sally: We needed that. We need hard winters.

Libby: We do.

Every once in a while, you need to let your plants go really dry. You don’t pick a tomato right after you’ve watered it. It will taste watery. You have to understand there’s a point to how plants work.

With fertilizer tea, you just let everything rot. I like to let it go at least three months before I use it. The stinkier the better. This stuff I started when I cleaned the yard in October, and I started using it in February and April.

At this point, it would probably wink back at me.

I keep topping it off when I use a bunch, and I go around and water the base of the plants every once in a while. Plants need to eat regularly, especially root vegetables that are growing big underneath the soil, like onions and potatoes. They get hungry, and they will make little tiny potatoes unless you feed them.

You do have to watch the makeup of the fertilizer, so you need to know your plants a little more specifically. I throw wood ash on my potato pile every once in a while because that has phosphorus (edit: potassium).

Sally: If it’s clean wood.

Libby: Yes, if it’s clean wood.

I’m saying all this so casually, but every single bit of this was me learning as an adult when my garden would say, “I actually need you to pay attention to something here.”

When my potato plants all wilted and died, I had to go look it up. I had to learn what mineral they needed.

I stopped worrying about harvest and started loving the cultivation. Then the harvest came.

If I pay attention to the process, the results come. Not invariably, but the pressure is off. Enjoy the ride.

I always have one potted mint, usually catnip or something, because when it starts to wilt, I know I absolutely have to water everything.

Sally: Because they’re so hardy.

Libby: They’re so hardy. If they start looking sad, I know my tomatoes are going to be mad at me.

The mint is my watch-out plant. It’s right on the stoop, and the adolescent tomcats come and roll around and chew on it. But if it starts wilting, I know I’ve been too lazy. I’m thankful to that plant.

I have plants that I’ve known for years now. I have a cherry tree. It’s huge now and covered with cherries this year. I planted it with Madelene when she was four, and it was this tall.

Ten years later, it is a full-grown tree. Madelene and I are going to climb ladders and pick cherries all weekend to freeze.

That is something I want her to know. I don’t need her to know how to weed a garden every morning right now. I need her to know that what we did then can be this now.

She’ll get the discipline later.

Anyway, I know I am a talker, so if you need to flag me down, you have to let me know because I will literally talk your ear off about gardening. I will drive you away.

Betty: No, this has been so engaging and richly detailed. We love the way you present things: anecdotal evidence, stories, all the good stuff.

Linda: I know you’re talking about plants and gardening, Libby, but it’s a life lesson about releasing, nurturing, paying attention to your plants, and having a relationship with them and with the earth. It’s lovely. Just lovely.

Betty: I’m glad you tied it together with whatever end result there is because I did want to ask an open-ended question. You’re saying thank you if you’re harvesting something. Right there, there’s the love and the gratitude.

Libby: Absolutely.

Harvest is a prayer of such gratitude.

I believe in walking prayer. I believe any act I take can be prayer. Any time of rest can be meditation and listening for the answer.

Harvest is a prayer of gratitude. It is also a chance for restraint. I leave one lettuce plant to go fully to seed because I like to grow my own seeds.

Right now, the chard is going bananas because it bolted, so we’re going to have tons of chard seeds now.

Harvesting those seeds is another kind of abundance. Every single one of those seeds could feed my family for a season. The possibility of abundance is mind-boggling.

How can I fret over traffic? How can I be mad that somebody didn’t remember my name? My chard plant just gave me fifty gardens’ worth of seeds. How can I possibly be angry today?

It makes me realize I’m part of a much larger and beneficent universe. Creation has every intention of making sure we all have enough if we get out of the way or take part. If we jump into the flow of things, we can instantly be in touch with that beneficence.

However we can.

In Brooklyn, I used to take the butts of lettuce and put them in the windowsill. They would grow little leaves, and we’d trim them off. You can grow spring onions from one little clipping. The bottom of a spring onion can give you spring onion clippings for months. Same with garlic. Put a garlic clove in, and you can have garlic sprouts for months.

It’s not that we need an acre to do this. You need a cup of dirt, willingness, and a seed. One little seed.

I am, of course, very much in the Christian tradition. It is what I have dedicated the rest of my life to. But I’m also a country girl, and we loved collard greens growing up.

Collard greens are a mustard seed variation, a variant of the mustard plant. Every culture has a variation of the mustard plant: cabbage, radishes, broccoli, cauliflower. Look at what we have done over time for each other by going from one little weed with tiny little seeds.

Of course, there’s the Christian parable of the mustard seed. But let’s think about this as humans across all traditions. Look at what growing things has done for us. We have changed one little weed on the side of the path into hundreds of different possible foods for our beloveds.

That is cultivation to me.

We have no idea the positive impact we can have if we stop, listen, and take part in growing something. We have no idea what can happen. It always changes us if we are willing to grow beside it and be open.

My very unkempt garden is a mirror of my soul, but it has become a fixture not only in my life, but in my neighborhood’s life and my family’s life.

We’re going to be picking red currants in a month. We have a whole red currant discipline. We’re going to decide together whether we want to make a tincture out of the elderberry flowers or wait for the elderberries.

Does anybody want some homegrown horseradish? Because it will not stop growing.

That sets us up for the next segment of fire cider, which we love making in the fall.

Because of you ladies, because of the Crones, I’ve been able to frame my garden even more as a spiritual practice. Your influence means that I no longer kill all my mugwort.

I have two stalks of mugwort in the front yard that are about my height, and I can’t wait to learn how to make a mugwort wand.

Sally: I was just thinking yesterday, because I have mugwort growing wild outside. It loves it here. I think it’s time to teach how to harvest and make a mugwort wand.

Libby: I’ve got two very stout mugwort plants in the front and several hundred dozen in the back.

What makes something a weed is intention on our part.

Even poison ivy. Poison ivy is vital. It’s a sacred plant. In Provincetown you wouldn’t have a beach without poison ivy. It is a much-maligned plant where we are, of course, and it causes issues. But that plant is a blessing. It’s a protector.

Sally: It is absolutely a protector.

Libby: Instead of spraying something harsh to get rid of it, we can learn better measures of abatement and recognize that this is not always a problem. We do not need to treat it with the nuclear option every single time.

Betty: Well, this has been so delightful, and we are coming to the end of our podcast.

Is there any one last thing you would like to share, or would you like to wrap up? Anything that drops into your consciousness that you think would be interesting for our listeners to hear?

Libby: When I was teaching full-time, I would always tell my students, “It doesn’t matter where you jump in the river. You’re going to get wet.”

The same thing happens with gardening. It doesn’t matter where you drop that seed into dirt. You can grow something.

It belongs to you. It is your birthright as a being on this planet. Even birds grow things. I’ve got two little volunteer cherry trees completely from birds.

Take part. Demystify it.

Grab a cup of dirt and see what you learn. If it doesn’t grow, try again. This is absolutely part of your right as a living being on this planet: to make something grow.

Sally: That is an amazing wisdom practice, and we invite you to drop the seed.

Betty: That’s right. Find some way to drop a seed and have an experience, whatever that experience is.

Libby: And it’s all valuable. You will grow if the plant doesn’t. There’s no harm, no foul.

Linda: Let us know if you drop the seed. Get on one of the social media things and say, “Hey, I took Libby’s wisdom practice, and this is what happened.” You could send a picture of it. We’ll post your picture.

Libby: There’s no such thing as not having a green thumb. People are so fearful. Stop expecting to wake up to a full banana tree. Just sprout and dance for that bean sprout.

Betty: Thank you so much for being here.

Libby: Thank you, ladies, so much for having me. I’m honored to finally be on the podcast.

Linda: This has been delightful in so many ways. I can hardly wait to re-listen to it myself.

Betty: We do need to wrap up. I’m going to invite you to go find your glimmer. Find that micro-moment that is the still point for you and the reconnection with our beautiful world.

Linda: I would second that heartily. I think our muddy waters have cleared up a bit with this podcast. It was such a great podcast: a lot of fun, a lot of laughter, and a lot of good information on how to honor Mother Earth.

Sally: I love it because we’re talking about muddy waters, and really, we talked about how to create a worm bin and how to create some truly foul-smelling stuff that will fertilize your garden.

I’m going to have to blog some resources around the things Libby’s talking about, and Libby may jump in and help me with that.

Libby: I’ll send you some, too.

Sally: So if you want to do that, you can absolutely do that.

Remember, no matter what you’re doing, whether it’s creating a worm bin or creating foul sludge from rainwater, we are always surrounded by beauty.

I think you gave us so many ways today to remember that we are always surrounded by beauty and that we are creating that beauty. Whether it’s giving a champagne berry to a kid who lives in the city who may know nothing about gardening, but now is intrigued because you have a raspberry hedge and a tree full of cherries, there are a lot of ways we can create beauty and remind others that we are always surrounded in beauty.

Remember Kadesh: all is made beautiful.

Thank you for reminding us of that, Libby.

Linda: Thank you so much. What a wonderful podcast.

Libby: Thank you. Thank you so much.

All: Bye, everybody.