Is Your Farm Producing Fruit that Will Last?

Your garden can look amazing while your life quietly runs on empty, and that’s exactly why we wanted to hit pause and talk about “fruit that lasts.” 

I’m Noah Sanders, and this is a catch-up from our family, our farm, and the work God keeps pressing on my heart: stop chasing what looks impressive and rebuild life from the roots up. If you care about Christian homesteading, faith-based farming, and land stewardship that actually holds together over time, this one is a needed reset.

In this episode I share highlights from the Homestead Conference in Texas, including what I taught on thermal composting and why gardening in the Deep South feels like relearning everything. Pests, heat, red-clay soil, and year-round growth change the game for Alabama and the southeastern United States, and that’s part of why I’m working on a new book with my friend David the Good, focused on dependable Deep South survival gardening. 

I also give an update on the Well-Watered Garden Project, a simple 20 foot by 20 foot training garden built on Foundations for Farming principles, designed to help Christians grow food while practicing humility, unselfishness, and faithfulness.

Then we go deeper. John 15 doesn’t leave room for fake fruit: Jesus is the vine, we’re the branches, and real growth comes from abiding in Christ. We talk about pruning, limits, and why the smallest daily moments often reveal the truest state of our discipleship. If you feel stretched thin, this will help you rethink what obedience looks like right now.

Subscribe for more, share this with a friend who’s carrying too much, and leave a review so more homesteaders can find the show. What’s one commitment you need to prune this season?

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Transcript

Catch Up And Episode Aim

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Redeeming the Dirt Podcast. I'm Noah Sanders. Great to have you this week. Well, this week's episode, we're gonna do a little bit of a catch-up episode, because it's been a little while since we have posted something, um, or I have posted something, and so I want to give you kind of some uh updates, share a few things that are going on, and then talk a little bit about some of my thoughts on just the idea of bearing fruit that will last. As farmers and homesteaders to follow Jesus, uh, it should be our goal to glorify God through the fruit in our lives. But it can sometimes be a bit challenging to understand uh what real fruit looks like and to be satisfied with externals and not necessarily uh be investing in what's going to really last. So we'll talk about that a little bit.

Homestead Conference Takeaways

SPEAKER_00 0:48

Um, but first a few updates. Um our family's been doing well. We had a great trip to the Homestead Conference in Texas. If you're near Wego, Texas next April, I think it is, when the next conference is, highly recommend you going. It's uh hosted by Homestead Heritage There, and those people uh have done a great job, and we've really enjoyed uh going. And it was great to be able to meet many of you. And we talked about, or I talked about, composting for homesteaders and taught the compost thermal composting method that I learned from Foundations for Farming in Africa and shared a little bit of our story, and it seemed to be a real blessing to people. And then we also talked about, or I also talked about, our whole family was there. So it feels like such a joint effort that I include we and all of it, my wife and our uh kids, eight kids. And anyways, the second talk was about gardening in the south because that's sometimes a little bit uh hard for us that live in the southeastern United States. I live in Alabama, and this was in Texas. And for some reason, a lot of gardening books and really good gardeners out there are all from the north. I actually had a market gardener friend that I was talking at the farmer's market with one day, and he had moved from uh a northern part of the country down to Alabama to garden, and he was shocked with how difficult it was, and he said it was like relearning and starting all over again. He was dealing with pests and this weather and the kind of soil that we have and the year-round climate of everything growing, and there's no break in the winter and all that. So, anyways, it can be a great place to grow in the south if you don't have unrealistic expectations. So I shared a little

Gardening In The Deep South

SPEAKER_00 2:28

bit about that. Um, and uh gave some sneak peek copies of my upcoming book that I have put together or wrote with uh written with David the Good, my friend, um, who is a longtime Southern gardener from Florida and now lives in lower Alabama. And we kind of put together our experiences in a new book that we're currently editing. Here's a copy of it for those of you who are watching um Deep South Survival Gardening, just kind of some of our uh tips and tricks on how to grow food uh that you can depend on if you live in the deep south, and some of the history of people growing here and when times were hard, and our uh favorite crops, things that what tips and techniques work well in our different regions. And David's a very uh humorous writer, so uh it's funny we we don't always agree on everything in the book, but uh when it comes out, I will uh let you guys know we're currently working on uh the find some more better editing. Those of you who got the early copy can tell that there's still some typos and stuff, but we wanted to get people at that conference some early editions, and then I'm trying to work on a few illustrations because it's always great to have some pictures. Uh, a few other kind of uh updates.

Book Sneak Peek And Editing

SPEAKER_00 3:41

We have a baby coming in November, and we're very grateful and excited about that. So you can be in prayers for my wife. Um the Wellwater Garden website. If you

Baby News And Wellwater Garden

SPEAKER_00 3:53

have not checked out our new updated Wellwater Garden website, highly recommend that you do so. We now have a map on there where you can see people that have chosen to uh to put their Wellwater Garden location on the map so everybody can see it. Uh, you can check out where there are people working with training uh using the Wellwater Garden curriculum that we wrote and uh based on Foundations for Farming principles. And to remind some of you who are maybe not familiar with it, or to tell you if you're not familiar with it, the Wellwater Garden is a simple 20 by 20, 20 foot by 20 foot training garden that uh utilizes the principles of Foundations for Farming to teach people how to grow uh some of their own food, vegetables, and weaves into it the uh the heart of Jesus, really, his humility, looking to nature and learning from how God does things, um, approaching that with a humble heart, unselfishness, uh, wanting to give back to the land and use this garden to teach other people, and then faithfulness, doing everything on time to a high standard with minimal waste and with joy. And this garden has been very effective as a duplicating tool to be able to teach people not only how to grow their own food, but to equip Christians with a simple method that they can serve into their community and that helps them to understand how to think about agriculture and land stewardship from a Christian perspective. So check out the Wildwater Garden website and it's WildwaterGardenproject.org, WellwaterGardenproject.org. And you can, if you haven't already, download the free Wildwater Garden handbook. You can also order it from Amazon. It's available there if you want to print copy, which is sometimes cheaper than uh printing it yourself. And you can connect with other people that might be in your area. I just uh received an email from a lady last night who was interested in connecting with someone that was working in Indiana near her. So uh highly recommend you checking that out.

What Does Lasting Fruit Mean

SPEAKER_00 5:52

Okay, so to talk about this idea of bearing fruit that will last. As Christians, we really should make it our goal to glorify God in everything that we do. The Bible says, so whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God, and that's in 1 Corinthians 10 31. And Jesus says, this is to my Father's glory that you bear much fruit. So we want to bear fruit, but it can be challenging sometimes to know how to measure that, how to evaluate that. And it can be tempting for me or uh if for anybody that's wanting to really serve the Lord and do that through serving people, uh, we can often uh get imbalanced at times.

Cutting Back To Stay Faithful

SPEAKER_00 6:33

So this year, we've really focused on cutting back on the number of trainings that we're doing, that we're investing in other people, because we kind of come out of a season of uh serving into other people. And it's been a real blessing to do that. And it's been awesome to do that with our family and on our farm and with our home. But there comes a time where if you're always outputting and you're not actually uh applying, sharing, investing, growing uh in your model and in your application of what you're talking about, then uh not only do you get drained, but you don't continue to be a good example of what you're trying to tell people that God is calling us to do as Christians, to shine for Him in stewardship and in discipleship. So what we've done this year is we've tried to focus on what does our family need to be more faithful? What does our farm need to be able to be a better example? What can we do to invest in our community, to invest in our church? And it's just been a good um opportunity to do that.

Home Base Before New Missions

SPEAKER_00 7:34

One of our big projects this spring has been to uh enclose our back porch and turn uh part of it into a sun room, part of it into a utility room. And I think it comes from these conversations that my wife and I have where we really take time to plan together, to pray together, to be on the same page as a team, to say, what is it that we need to be able to do what God's calling us to do? And as a husband, uh, a large part of my ability to do the mission that I'm to lead and help our family know where we're going and to take the initiative in that and to disciple and shepherd is dependent on whether on the foundation that's really laid ultimately by my wife and the home and the operations that it takes to uh feed and clothe and care for um these 10 people that are in our family. And definitely I help out with that, but it's something that uh her focus enables me to focus on these other outward kind of missional things that our family's doing.

The Ship And The Voyage

SPEAKER_00 8:42

Uh, I kind of view it as, you know, you have the ship, which is our family and our home, and it's got to be outfitted, the crew's got to be cared for, you got to make sure it's not leaking, and then it's provisioned and that, you know, the crew's trained and all these kind of things. But it's not just to sit in the harbor, right? It's to go somewhere, to get something done, to accomplish a mission. It's to go on a voyage. And that's kind of what I'm responsible for, is what's God calling us to go do? And my wife is incredibly important in making sure that we can make it there and that we can get there successfully and everybody survives and we have what we need. But if I don't make sure that I'm prioritizing what she needs to do that, then uh just focusing on the mission to the neglect of the ship is not going to get us very far. So part of that this year was okay, let's troubleshoot the laundry system, let's troubleshoot what we need to be able to do hospitality better, where we have different spaces to be able to, you know, let the kids be loud over here, but we can still have private conversations over here. And so part of that, those discussions uh helped us understand we needed to kind of uh make some improvements and some additions to enclose some of our porches so that they could be used year-round and also create a utility room. And it's been a lot of work and uh a lot of investment in cre in finishing these porches out. Uh, but it's been a huge blessing to be able to work with my sons to teach them the carpentry and all the finishing skills and stuff, and and they ran the electrical, and that's that's been awesome. But also uh it's just been neat to, even though it's cost a bit of the projects that are on my list on the farm, now to see how much smoother the the home is running just with the few days in a sense that we have been operating with these extra spaces helps me to really be uh inspired that it's worth it to be that team and to invest in what my wife needs to run the home well. And we can't always do everything all the time, but uh I think this has been a great season to buckle down and excel in investing in that that base of operations and really the the thing that the fruit comes

Porch Project And Family Teamwork

SPEAKER_00 10:50

from. So I think sometimes it's easy for me to chase fruit to say, okay, well, what are we doing? You know, what is the things that that are easily visibly measurable, just kind of like in churches, you know, how many people got decided, you know, got saved or came forward, those are the easy things to measure, but they don't really necessarily always indicate good long-term fruit, because that is really determined by where is the visible stuff that you're seeing coming from. You know, you can have a really good garden, but if it's at the expense of other areas of your life, at the expense of the relationships in your life, then it's not necessarily fruit that's going to last. But if you have a really good garden because of the productivity of the family team that you're investing in, and that that garden is an overflow of the health of the relationships in your family, not something that you're trying to prop up at the expense of your family just because you want it to look good and you think, oh, this is really what is needed for us to look good. You know, this is the fruit. We don't want to lose the fruit of this garden, then it can be easy to compromise what is actually real fruit, which is what God adds when we are faithful with the things that really matter. And of course, the first of those is abiding in Christ, in the vine. I'm just gonna read this uh the section that talks about this in John 15. It says, Jesus talking to the disciples, I am the true vine, and my father is the gardener. He cuts off every branch in me that bears no fruit, while every branch that does bear fruit, he prunes, so that it will be even more fruitful. That's amazing. Uh you're already clean because of the word I have spoken to you. Remain in me, and I will remain in you. No branch can bear fruit by itself, it must remain in the vine. Neither can you bear fruit unless you remain in me. I am the vine, this is Jesus saying, He's the vine, you are the branches, we his disciples are the branches. If a man remains in me, and I in him, he will bear much fruit. Apart from me, you can do nothing. And then later on it says, This is to my Father's glory that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. So, of course, the first thing that is important uh in understanding whether or not we're bearing true fruit that's going to last is whether it's an overflow of our relationship with Christ. It's an

When Visible Fruit Becomes A Trap

SPEAKER_00 13:29

overflow of us abiding in him. Not, you know, that means, of course, seeking him in the word, seeking him in prayer, seeking him through the fellowship of the church, seeking him together as a family, seeking him individually as family members, um, but also applying and bringing him into every area of our life, letting him be the king and the healer and the one that we are going to when we face any problems in any area of our life. And that can be humbling because what God, what Jesus really calls us to at times is the ever you know, the unimpressive, the being faithful to love in the hard moments, being faithful to take care of and maintain and invest in the things that um aren't very impressive. Uh and I think God is jealous for authentic fruit. Like if I've overstretched myself where I'm really having to uh sacrifice things that God's called me to, sacrifice family time, sacrifice uh finances that I don't have in order to do to to keep up with the commitments or things that I feel like are the fruit I need to be having in my life, ministry opportunities or how much I'm doing on the farm or anything like that, uh then ultimately it's being propped up at the expense of faithfulness, where real fruit comes from being faithful with little. I was telling somebody recently that you know

Abiding In Christ From John 15

SPEAKER_00 15:15

if we've we're attempting to do a garden that takes 40 hours a week, we have so many animals and all these, you know, all these things that we're trying to do on a farm that take 40 hours of labor a week, and we really only have available 10. And so we're really working overtime to try to make it look amazing. But what we're doing is we are kind of falsely uh displaying this. We we want it to look like it can succeed and look nice and well taken care of, and that it's possible to do this level of activity and and investment with only as many time and resources as we have, which when we don't actually have enough time and resources to do that without cutting into the other things, then you're just kind of propping up a fake visible example of, hey, this is what you can do when it's actually not really what you can do. You need to be if it, if it's not what God's given you the time and resources to do well in a balanced way that allows you to continue to be faithful in the other areas of your life, then you need to be willing to say, I can step back from that. My garden could le look weedy right now if I really need to prioritize something else. I can cut back the size of it, I can say no to this, I can allow God basically to prune me in order to bear more fruit, not just continue to hold on to all these branches, because what's going to happen is then those branches are gonna break. Um, and long term it's actually not gonna be really fruit that lasts. And so I think that's where I'm trying to step back and say, where does real lasting fruit come from? That comes from having time to listen to the Lord. It comes from being able to invest in the the unimpressive things, the the relationships that you don't get written up in the newspaper for, you know, your wife, your kids, um, the the people in your church. And

Pruning Commitments And Real Limits

SPEAKER_00 17:29

these are sometimes the most challenging, the people, the relationships that are closest to us, um, being faithful with our finances, being faithful with our health, being faithful with again our walk with the Lord. And these are things that we've got to make time for, things that we need to uh to to understand are the foundation of God producing long-lasting fruit. We could have an amazing farm, an amazing ministry, even. But eventually it's we're gonna see whether that was built at the expense of the other things that God's called us to do in life, or if they were an overflow of faithful investment in the things that God really cares about and it comes from that abiding in Christ and just following in obedience, not necessarily having this goal, but having instead a commitment to obedience that allows God to create whatever fruit he wants to come from it. Um, something that may look impressive in the eyes of the world or the church, or they may not ever notice, but God notices, and that's what he's jealous for, is that real real fruit. You know, that's easy sometimes on a farm to sacrifice the long-term uh fruit that we can see for the short term. And we've done that a lot on our farm. You know, let's get the animals right away, and and all of a sudden you're doing enterprises and operations that you're really not set up for, you really don't know how to do them, and it takes such a much longer time to get to a place where you can do them excellently because you sacrifice the ability to do it well long term for just doing it um right away short term because we're so excited and we just want to get on on it right away. Or we don't want to sacrifice either the small moments, which is where our life lives, um, for just the large moments, saying, Oh, well, the the big things matter and the big things I'm gonna do well for the Lord, but the small little moments I'm letting things slide, angry comments or unfaithfulness or laziness. Um, so we want to make sure that we are living for the long term, but in the small moments, and not sacrificing uh not prioritizing the short term and only living for Christ in the big

Small Moments Reveal True Fruit

SPEAKER_00 19:59

moments. So for our family right now, this kind of looks like uh taking the time to quote pull our boat up on the shore in a sense, uh, to kind of refit it and to make repairs so that we can continue taking voyages, continue to uh pursue the mission of helping others, helping the church to be faithful in the realm of stewardship, especially in terms of the relationship we have with the land, but all the other things that are connected to that that are required for us to be faithful, faithful in our families and with our finances and with uh our uh faith and our walk with Jesus and all that. So that's kind of what we're working on right now. And I'm also trying to work some on some book projects. I really feel like the Lord wants me to take some of what he's shown me and some of the stories and stuff that uh I think might be encouraging to people and necessary to share that I've learned over the last decade or so and and take a season to write those down and to kind of put organize my thoughts a bit from some of the things that we've learned. And I hope that he'll uh give me some, or I trust that he'll show me how to spend my time with that to be able to hopefully create some new books and resources that will be a blessing to other people. So keep me in your prayers for that. So as we think though, as we wrap this up and we think about this idea of lasting fruit, some ch questions that I want to challenge us with is you know, what does the fruit look like in our lives? What would other people see? It's the fruit in our lives, but more importantly, what does God see? And sometimes that's uh may not be what impresses other people, but it's what God sees is it's those that hidden life that's the investment in things that have eternal value. And what does the way that your garden looks like? What is it really saying? Is it saying that that's an idol? Is it saying that you aren't being faithful with it? Is it what's it telling you about your overall faithfulness and obedience to Christ? And especially what does it say about your connection to the vine, right? To your relationship to God. Are you kind of going along and saying, Here's all these things I'm doing for you, God? Or are you saying, God, what are you calling me to? I only want to walk in obedience. And that's really important because in in Matthew 7 it talks about not everybody who comes and says, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only those who do the will of my Father in heaven. And that many will come on that day saying, Lord, Lord, didn't we prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and perform any miracles? And he will say, I never knew you. So we don't want to say, Hey, Lord, I did all these amazing things. I farmed for you, and I, you know, tried to decrease my dependency on the world's systems, and I tried to serve others and all that. But if it's just what we're doing, then even if it looks good from the church's perspective or from the world's perspective, uh, it is not something that God is going to count because it doesn't, it's not an overflow of our relationship to Him. And I think one of the things that's really uh convicting to me is just this idea, uh, we heard it from some marriage videos we were going through that were by Paul Tripp. And one of the points he made was this idea that our life, the life that God sees, really lives in the little moments of every day. And so what do are the little moments of our life say about the fruit that we're really producing? And I think that would be a good question for all of us to think about, consider, and to ask God what kind of growth he wants to see in our lives.

Listener Feedback And Final Charge

SPEAKER_00 23:43

I hope this has been helpful today. I'm I'm hoping that the Lord will help me to be able to prioritize uh making some more of these, doing some more of these podcasts just to share what I'm learning and kind of get your feedback along the way. If any of you guys want to send me some of your thoughts or ideas, feel free to do so. Noah Rora at Protonmail.com. That's N-O-A-H-R-O-R-A at protonmail.com. And I look forward to hearing from some of you. But be faithful out there and don't neglect the basic everyday small duties and obediences, and especially listening to the Lord and investing in the people around you that God's put for you to love and you to serve. Until next time, I encourage you to be faithful, to be humble, and to keep redeeming the dirt. God bless.