Being from Brooklyn, I came to manure late in life.  By that I mean in my 30's when I started reading Organic Gardening magazine.  Free is good, I thought.  So at first I picked up some free manure from a local horse owner.  Good stuff but along with my tomatoes were an awful lot of weeds.  There had to be something better and off I went to the local nursery where it wasn't free but it was close to dirt cheap.  And it was sterilized - no weeds, no hay!

A few years ago when I first…

I was reading Ashley W's short post about what she perceived as a generation gap between her and the older members of her meeting.  The topic seemed familiar but being a 70 year old convinced Quaker I knew it wasn't age alone that she was running into but something more problematical.

In the 13th chapter of the Gospel of Luke, starting at the 6th verse, Jesus tells the story of a…