October 2025 Newsletter
Meet a Community Gardener…
Penny’s search for a community garden quickly led her to The Neighborhood Garden Project. Having lived in the old Katy area for seven years, she was surprised to realize that she had passed this little piece of heaven almost daily without noticing it. The constant pace of life had kept her so engaged that she rarely paused to look up and look around.
The Neighborhood Garden Project has since become a special place for Penny, offering benefits beyond measure. The garden has slowed her pace, encouraged more face-to-face conversations, and opened the door to new friendships and connections.
Many of these connections begin with the simple act of gardening but soon unfold into deeper conversations about life, community, and resilience. The time Penny spends in the garden has tethered her to nature, and the garden’s “ecotherapy” has greatly improved her overall well-being.
In a world that often leaves her drained and constantly engaged, the garden offers Penny space to reconnect with the earth. Listening to the rhythms of nature, she has become more aware of her senses. “What can I see? What can I feel? What do I smell? What do I hear?” and her favorite question of all, “What do I taste?”
Penny describes her relationship with the garden as symbiotic. She gives to the soil, and the garden always gives back.
Refining the Hive: Lessons from Robber Flies
At first glance, every fuzzy insect in the garden looks like a bee. Yet not all are helpers. Some are hunters disguised as bees, part of the balance that keeps the garden alive. Honeybees are the most familiar pollinators, living in colonies that may number fifty thousand. Their hairy bodies and constant movement make them one of the most important pollinators for fruit and vegetable crops, and through their waggle dance, they even communicate food sources to one another, multiplying their reach. Gentle when left alone, honeybees are vital for fruit, seed, and new life. Yet they were introduced to North America from Europe and can be too efficient at times. A single hive can strip millions of flowers of nectar and pollen in a day, leaving less for solitary native pollinators such as mason bees or leafcutter bees. Their sheer numbers also make them easy targets for predators like robber flies.
The insect pictured here looks like a bee, but it is a robber fly holding a honeybee in its grasp. Robber flies are predators that mimic bees and wasps to blend in. With large eyes and strong legs, they ambush prey in midair, pierce it with a straw-like mouthpart, inject paralyzing enzymes, and drink the liquefied insides. There are more than seven thousand species of robber flies worldwide, and about one thousand in North America. Each lives alone, returning to the same perch day after day. Unlike honeybees that embody community, robber flies embody independence. And yet, their role is not destruction. Robber flies refine the hive’s reach. They rarely take the strong or the most resilient foragers. Instead, they remove those that are weak, distracted, or less productive. In doing so, they ease pressure on flowers, create space for native pollinators, and ensure that what remains in the honeybee population is hardy enough to keep thriving.
We often romanticize honeybees as the heroes of the garden. But a healthy ecosystem is not built on helpers alone. Predators, mimics, and even the insects we misunderstand all have roles that preserve balance. Honeybees are vital to agriculture and food production, but they are only one piece of the puzzle. By refining rather than erasing, predators like robber flies help maintain diversity and resilience, ensuring the garden is not fragile but strong.
The same is true for people. It is easy to think a garden naturally attracts like minded individuals, but gardening is only a fraction of who someone is. They bring their full selves, their personal past, the ways they have been shaped by culture, and what remains after a life lived or still in process. Some arrive carrying energy that feels like a honeybee, easy to welcome and clearly beneficial. Others bring edges that feel more like a robber fly, harder to understand at first glance. Yet both belong. A thriving garden is not a gathering of identical interests. It is a meeting ground where differences, tensions, and unexpected roles create the balance that allows connection and growth. The garden is a mirror. It reflects how disconnected we often are from ourselves and each other. We do not always know how to walk together. But when we are willing to hold space for friction rather than erase it, the soil becomes a place where transformation is possible. Connection does not grow in sameness. It grows when we stand together on common ground and let the collisions shape us.
Wings of Beauty, Work of Purpose
The Gulf Fritillary butterfly, with its brilliant orange wings and silver-spotted undersides, is often admired for beauty alone. Yet beauty is only part of the story. These butterflies carry out a quiet but vital function in the garden and beyond. Their life begins on passionvine (Passiflora), where the caterpillars feed. This relationship may look destructive at first, but it is actually purposeful, keeping the vigorous vine in check and ensuring the butterfly’s next generation.
Butterflies are too often reduced to decoration in our minds. We pause to marvel at their colors, but rarely stop to consider what they contribute. The Gulf Fritillary shows us that beauty and function go hand in hand. While their wings flash in the sunlight, they are also busy pollinating as they move from flower to flower, spreading pollen that ensures fruit, seed, and future growth. Their beauty may draw us in, but their work sustains the life around them.
The influence of the Gulf Fritillary reaches beyond the garden’s edges. They are part of the food web, serving as nourishment for birds, lizards, and other creatures. By carrying out their life cycle in our landscapes, they strengthen pollinator communities and help ensure that plant life continues to flourish. Their beauty, then, is not just ornamental. It is protective, purposeful, and revealing. It teaches us to look deeper, to see that beauty in creation is never wasted. It is always tied to function and always connected to life.
In many ways, the Gulf Fritillary also serves as a reminder of resilience. Their life cycle is not without vulnerability. Eggs are exposed, caterpillars are often preyed upon, and wings are fragile in storms. Yet through these challenges they continue to appear each season, bright and determined. Their presence in the garden is a living picture of how creation endures through both beauty and struggle. When we see them hovering over flowers or resting with wings spread wide, we are witnessing not only a pollinator at work but a story of persistence and renewal that mirrors the rhythms of the garden itself.
The Rhythm of Growth
At Emmanuel Episcopal Church, our second site is unfolding in a steady rhythm. The educational plots are already complete, serving as a living classroom where children, families, and neighbors can gather to learn, ask questions, and experience the basics of cultivation together. These beds have given us a place to demonstrate, to teach, and to grow side by side.
Now, the beginning of our community plots marks the next chapter. The first ten beds are built and ready, opening the way for families to step into stewardship of their own plots. These spaces are more than frames of wood and soil; they are places for people to put down roots, discover rhythms of growth, and tend the earth with intention. Several families are preparing to begin planting soon, and our focus is to walk with them first, building relationship and presence before they place the first seeds in their own beds.
For this reason, we ask each family to begin with 20 hours of shared work alongside the community. This co-laboring grounds us in the garden’s rhythm and allows relationships to grow as naturally as the plants themselves. The next step will be a deeper learning season: exploring soil health, seed selection, weed and pest identification, and recognizing weather and seasonal patterns. Just as the soil is patiently prepared, families are invited to prepare themselves by rooting in knowledge, relationship, and practice.
The tarps covering the plots hold this posture of preparation. Drip lines run steadily underneath, watering often enough to break down fertilizer and keep the soil alive. While the beds rest, unseen work is taking place. The soil is being quietly prepared, just as the families are being prepared in terms of relationship and learning.
We have seen a great deal of enthusiasm from people who want to begin right away. That excitement is good, but we have also learned that if someone is given a plot too soon, the challenges of weeds, pests, and changing seasons can quickly overwhelm them. What begins with eagerness can easily fade into discouragement. By holding space and preparing both soil and people at the right pace, we create the conditions for long-term growth rather than short bursts of activity.
Most of the families we meet have never gardened before or have only minimal experience. Gardening cannot be done passively, and it is not something that flourishes on excitement alone. It requires consistent presence, patience, and the willingness to return again and again, even when the work is hard. This is why the first step is shared labor and learning, so that people are prepared for the commitment required to steward their own plots.
Our garden stewards bring decades of experience, sharing not only practical knowledge but also the deeper rhythms that gardening reveals. These rhythms extend beyond the soil, shaping how we see time, presence, and patience in our daily lives. Learning to garden well becomes an invitation to live well, to move at the pace of creation rather than at the pace of hurry.
Together, the educational and community plots form a whole picture: one as a place of demonstration and teaching, the other as a space for personal stewardship. Both remind us that true growth takes time, patience, and presence, and that readiness, whether in soil or in people, is worth waiting for.
