Michigan Camp Meeting 2023: The Boldness of the Cross

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Gardening Tips: Preparing for Eternity in the Dirt

EJ Wolf

01 Preparing the Soul - Biochar

You are about to enjoy a presentation recorded at the 2023 Michigan Conference Camp Meeting held at Cedar Lake, Michigan.

We pray that the Lord will bless you as you listen.

Heavenly Father, thank you so much for your abundant love for us.

We're grateful, Lord, that you have given this institution a great prize as a greenhouse.

And we ask, Lord Jesus, that you guide us and lead us as we desire, not just to grow vegetables, but to grow young people into an army of people ready with the character of Christ to share with the world the love of Christ.

Today I wanna talk to you about soil health because gardening can be expensive.

Those of you who have gardened can realize, wow, things can add up really fast.

So I wanna share with you some things that we use that don't cost a whole lot of money because we're gardening in about an acre right behind you and you don't realize how big of an acre is until you're inside that greenhouse and you're like.

So our goal is start small and spend as little as possible to help it grow.

I want to tell you there's some good news.

Yesterday I went to a couple of local greenhouses.

They donated 2, 000 plants because I told them we wanted to help young people learn to be agricultural entrepreneurs.

What's different about the greenhouse this time?

We're not hiring students, we're giving students a plot of land.

You're going to take it from seed all the way to market.

We're not just gonna have you plucking weeds and clipping tomatoes.

We're going to show you the whole cycle so you learn how to have your own business.

And they're going to be able to use all of those proceeds, the profits from that, towards their education.

We've done the numbers and they're going to be able to make a whole lot more money than minimum wage if they got a strong work ethic, right?

And What a lot of employers are saying today is, people don't know how to work.

So 1 of the reasons I believe it's important for our institutions to have an agricultural program is so that students learn how to work, right?

If you've been gardening for a while, you might have all kinds of problems in your soil.

Water retention, microbial activity, infiltration, compaction, erosion.

These are all problems that gardeners face.

And we're gonna take a look at what are some of the solutions that don't cost you a lot of money.

But The very first school was the Garden of Eden.

And although the workload got a little more difficult after sin, there are still great lessons we learn by being inside the garden.

So what are some ways that we can feed our soil?

Because modern farming has really stripped our soil from so many different nutrients.

So I'm gonna share with you some ways that we use that are natural, that actually take carbon out of our atmosphere, like biochar, vermiculture, which has all the microbial life to put back into the soil, And we'll talk about the 3 traditional NPKs to help add nutrition in, cover crops and compost teas.

And then we're gonna go into all of these throughout the week in more detail.

So when you look at your plant, what do you see?

At the top, you see a little bit, kind of like an iceberg, right?

The iceberg is small at the top, but underneath, it's humongous.

And that's why I tell people, if you are succession planting, do not pull your plants out by the roots.

Cut it off down there at the base of the stem but leave those there.

Your next plants are going to benefit by having all of that organic material down there that is full of microbial life.

So what does it look like underneath your soil?

There is lots of bacteria, fungi, protozoa.

All of these things are living in your soil and they feed the roots of your plant.

When you put nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium in your soil, your roots can't absorb that.

The protozoa, the little worms, and by the way, there's 57 billion protozoa for every person on the earth.

Those protozoa digest that nutrition and what they excrete feeds the plant.

So having a living soil is really important, right?

When you're putting chemicals on your garden, what are you doing?

So I don't wanna name off any kind of products that you might be buying from the store, but please, let's feed our soil and have it come to life.

Just like in nature, what would happen if there was no plants?

Like the cougar, the cheetahs, the bobcats.

If our soil isn't living, then everything underneath the soil is gonna die too.

There's no better way to feed the soil than the way God feeds the soil.

When you look out inside the forest, what do you see?

Did somebody put their miracle grow all over in the forest?

When the leaves fall, it's growing fungi, bacteria that the nematodes and protozoa thrive on and help all the plants thrive too.

So underneath our soil, we need to realize all of these animals thrive when the soil thrives.

And so there's a couple of ways we can do that.

Anybody want to touch it, put it in your hands?

If you know what vermiculture is, it's worm poo.

Why are Worm castings like gold for your garden.

I'm going to show you how I have my own worm farm, probably tomorrow, but that's where this comes from, right?

Growing your worms, and they give you a great gift in return.

You take your food scraps, and when you put your food scraps in the trash, those food scraps decompose, but they're letting off methane, gas.

02 Transplanting & Garden Marketing Tools

Heavenly Father, you are the Master Gardener.

We're here to learn from you and we pray, Lord Jesus, that your sweet Spirit will guide us and lead us.

Give us a vision, Lord, for how to reach people the way Jesus did by mingling amongst people and to learn some of these skills that we can share with those around us.

So Cedar Lake Growers has a website, hallelujah.

It's about a month old, so it's new and it's gonna be a great resource for you after this week.

You want to continue your education, come here, you'll be able to sign up.

If you would like to have a speaker come to your church or your community let us know and we can come there and do a presentation for you.

If you want to know where we're gonna be doing presentations those will be listed on this website too.

We also have a YouTube channel so we're gonna be we have 3 videos there now but we'll be adding weekly to our YouTube channel on how to garden, and you can get all kinds of great tips there.

And of course, you can add some green to the greenhouse by making a donation on this site.

We also have a Facebook page, so let me know if you don't want your face on social media because I'll be taking pictures today and you may have a picture if you're in the greenhouse on our Facebook page.

But if you'd like to see some updates, those plants that you put in yesterday, If you want to see them grow, we'll be taking some updated pictures there and that'll be fun for you to kind of keep track of.

So good, it looks like our numbers have not disappointed.

We've maybe gained a couple more people today.

And there Adam and Eve learned of their Creator.

And what do you think the Garden of Eden looked like?

And what happens in a monoculture is all of these plants are fighting for the same nutrients.

So when they're planted next to each other, what's happening?

It's like 3 year olds and 5 year olds going back and forth about the nutrients.

But what happens when you plant, when you intercrop, when you've got a polyculture?

They give and take each other, they talk to each other, they let each other know what they need.

Fascinating study, in the desert they've put cover crop and when they had just 1 seed of cover crop, the soil grew a little and it was still sparsely covered.

When they put a variety of cover crop seed down and they all grew together, they fed the soil and the soil depth, Not only was it good here, it was good all the way down.

The studies are showing that the more different species of plants that you grow together, the more beneficial it is for the other plants that are with it.

Underneath this is the most diverse life on earth under the ground.

Tons of microbial life and they all need each other to work together well.

Biodiversity is a key factor in the effective functioning of all living systems.

The protozoa, The bacteria, the fungi, they all work together.

The microbes know what to do when you plant them together.

And what looks, doesn't that garden look beautiful?

They're densely planted, but are they thriving?

Because there's a diversity of crops together.

Wouldn't you like to have a garden that looks like that?

And yet, they're all thriving together, even though they're densely packed.

I've got several pictures of beautiful gardens, and you can get so much in a small space when you use these techniques.

So today, we're going to continue on our journey to learn about how to improve our soil structure.

Dealing with the noticing pictures a lot of flowers.

So planting flowers in, is this, you know, is that important?

You know, do you think the Garden of Eden has flowers?

And flowers are very beneficial to our gardens.

So the bees come over and they help our tomato plants and everything else that fruits, yes.

Is there anything that you do different for like a box garden or suburban garden?

My story begins in 2020 when COVID hit and my son said, well, let's have a little garden.

There's not a whole lot of anything else going on.

And then after those 6 raised beds, 4 by 8 raised beds.

So we built 6 more, and now there's 20 beds in our front yard, and 2 greenhouses in our backyard, and 9 50-foot beds.

And that's my son's business now, is Wolf Family Farms.

So if you'd like to get some fresh lettuce at the exhibit tent, Andrew's lettuce is there and that also goes to help Cedar Lake growers.

So today we're going to learn about compost and doesn't that look beautiful?

We talked a little bit about it yesterday but You need a mixture of 2 things.

And about 50-50 mixture will give you a good, and you layer it, water in between each layering.

So what are some problems that can happen with composting?

Yes, the battle wounds of being in the garden.

If your compost is starting to stink, you need to add more carbon.

03 Organic Herbicides and Pesticides Made at Home

Heavenly Father, thank you so much for the joy of getting our hands dirty.

The joy, Lord, of learning the wonderful spiritual lessons that we can learn in the dirt.

Today, Lord, I pray that you will show us how we can use gardening as a way to win souls for the kingdom.

Cedar Lake Growers is to grow young people to be an army of youth for the kingdom.

And you learn a lot in a garden, don't you?

So that is why we're called Cedar Lake Growers because our ultimate goal is to grow young people, grow our community, and make our little corner of the earth a better place.

How many of you were able to visit our Facebook page?

And our YouTube, Chase, some of you have maybe gone to the YouTube page, thank you for subscribing.

You'll be seeing several more posts coming up very shortly And I want to share this with you because it's been a powerful ministry in our neck of the woods.

We just started this spring with our elementary school.

If you saw this sign in your neighborhood that said free raised beds, would they catch your attention?

We just set it out there to the people who are already our friends.

And that day, we had 10 people, non-Adventists, who were interested in getting a free bed.

Now, it costs us, for wood materials and dirt, about $70.

And what we get in return for bringing them the soil and the wood is 6 weeks every day, not every day, every once a week we go to their house and we're training them how to garden.

And we learned from Ellen White that the way to follow Christ in ministry is to mingle amongst men, right?

And I can't think of anything better than gardening to do that.

To make great friends with people in our community.

And we gave them the book Steps to Christ.

We were not just wanting to have them grow their gardens, we wanted them to grow spiritually too.

And so every week we would go through a chapter of steps to Christ with them, and we would share with them some new tips, some of the tips that I've been sharing with you on how to help their veggies grow.

And let me tell you, it's so exciting not just to see veggies grow, but to see people grow for the kingdom.

And I want to encourage you, If you're willing to put a little bit of work in to share with your community what God has shared with you this week, then consider this.

Maybe take it to your board or your church leadership and say, you know, I think this might be a plan that could help.

I'll give you the curriculum that we've used.

I've got week by week what we've shared with them on a laminated paper, and I've got the questions.

We had 5 questions for each chapter of Steps to Christ just to kind of have a conversation with them about spiritual things, I'd be happy to put that resource on our website so that you can download that and do it yourself.

How many of you are interested in doing something like that?

Let me know if I put it on the website or not.

All right, we'll put that on the website to share with you all and I pray that it be a great blessing.

Today I want to talk to you a little bit about some of the tools for soil health and let's look at what your soil is composed of.

If your soil particles are quite large, we call it gravel.

If it gets a little smaller, then it's coarse sand and it goes all the way from fine sand silt to, if it's very fine, it's called clay, right?

How many of you have gravel in your garden?

So what do you do if you've got clay in your garden?

There is a tool that's going to be 1 of your best friends.

And what the broad fork does is it takes those tines and puts them deep inside that clay and it breaks it up just a little bit so that water can go in.

It protects the soil structure and it doesn't cause any noise or pollution.

It gently aerates the soil and it's about $175, but it's going to last you forever.

This thing is built like a tank so pretty easy to use.

And what you do is if you're going down your row you'll put it right there in the row, step on it with both feet, jump down, pull it back, go up another 6 or 7 inches, jump, and go back again until you've gone all the way down your row.

So an easy tool to use, And it does an amazing job to help break up that clay and help things to grow.

So what do you do if you've got the opposite problem?

What if you don't have clay but you've got gravel everywhere?

Or larger pieces, right, that you can't grow in.

There was a, I'm gonna share with you a story of a man who he bought 10 acres of land and everywhere he was at there was rocks.

So what he did was he put, he went out inside the forest and he saw how everything was growing so well right there next to his property.

And he said, God, what can we do to help me grow a garden around here?

As he looked, he saw just life growing everywhere.

It wasn't just the big trees, but there were ferns and all kinds of vegetative growth.

And how in the world did this same property, 1 that was clear, be all rocky, but the stuff that's where the trees are at, be so fertile, he would dig down through the leaves that had fallen and he pulled out dark, rich soil.

Every fall, the leaves come down and fertilize the forest.

And so he started thinking, I'm going to get myself a bunch of wood chips.

Now, not all wood chips are created equal.

So I would not encourage you to use red mulch that you buy.

It's dyed, so all that coloring's going inside your ground, but also it's expensive.

Everything's expensive these days, right?

And this mulch may not look as pretty, but your soil is going to say hallelujah.

Because it, especially if it's finer particles, it will decompose very quickly, it will feed the soil, it will keep the moisture in, and your trees and your gardens are going to love you for it.

This kind of looks like cedar, but you can use anything except for black walnut.

This is Paul and he's made some movies about his garden and they're called Back to Eden.

He knows a lot of Adventists and he loves our message.

His videos on YouTube are very Christ-centered and he's the 1 who went through his forest and saw what God had done to help everything grow so well and started asking tree services to come and dump all of their mulch at his place instead of going all the way down to the city dump.

And now he's got truckloads of people coming to visit him and look at his gardens and he doesn't have to fertilize.

He fertilizes the way God does, out in the forest.

Even the the driveway where he comes up, he's covered that with mulch too.

So when cars come and drive on it, they've been driving on it for years, but the ground's not compacted because that mulch helps everything just grow and look beautiful underneath.

He'll dig down 3 or 4 inches and he'll pull out dark, rich soil underneath that mulch, even where the cars have been driving.

So here's a couple of things to help you if you would like to do some mulching, he suggests to put some paper, newspaper down or some cardboard first and that'll help dampen any weeds that are already down there.

Then put some compulsive material of your choice and he suggests not just the the woody part of the mulch but something that's got everything in it with tree leaves, pine needles, anything works great inside the garden.

When you're ready to plant, just kind of push your mulch away.