Our Blogs

By Frankie/Leah OurGarden&SoulfulArtistry For twenty years in Alaska, we kept a garden during those brief, precious summers. Our fellow teachers would ask: "Did you get a good harvest this year?" And we would pause, because we didn't know how to explain that harvest wasn't the point. We weren't gardening to fill our freezer. We were gardening to keep ourselves whole after ten months of darkness and isolation. The vegetables we grew didn't matter nearly as much as the fact th

For twenty years, we survived Alaska's brutal winters by spending two of the year's summer months gardening at our home in Washington State. As educators on the frozen tundra, we didn't know we were practicing something called "therapeutic gardening." We just knew that when our hands touched soil, something inside us settled. The anxiety that built up over ten months of job stress and isolation - it loosened its grip when we were tending our small garden. When we retired and

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