Winter will be making its last gasp (hopefully!) later today here in North Texas. We go from a high temperature of eighty degrees to a Monday high in the fifties with a frost warning for the morning. Weather in North Texas, particularly this year, can be diagnosed with severe bi-polar disorder. We go from extreme highs to extreme lows in a flash. It’ll be ninety degrees by Thursday. It looks like our tomatoes and peppers will be covering my kitchen floor tonight…
I picked up our transplants of tomatoes and peppers on Thursday. Tarrant County College’s Northwest Campus Horticulture students grew our starts again this year as they have for the past five years. I’ve been so grateful to have such a wonderful partner for the farm at TCC. Instructor David Cole has not only grown our starts every year, but he’s also brought his Food Crops class to Opal’s for a workday and tour each semester. We love having them out and the ongoing volunteer relationships that develop.
Steven and David
This year we had an additional treat as Steven Nunez, of Mind You Garden Urban Farm and Grow SE, joined TCC as head of the Horticulture. Steven and his wife Ursala have been a vital part of Grow and done amazing work with Mind Your Garden – a homestead farm in southeast Fort Worth.
I also had the privilege of hosting some of the IM Terrell Academy seniors for a volunteer day this past week. It’s always such a pleasure to see young people working hard and enjoying a day at the farm. They were a tremendous help and accomplished more than I could have imagined in their morning with at Opal’s Farm.
IM Terrell Academy Seniors
I also had to reschedule our Grand Opening for Opal’s Farm Stand to April 4th (the first Saturday) and make some changes to the proposed days. We will be at 1115 Evans (Evans and Rosedale) every Saturday from 1 PM to 4 PM. We’ll still be taking some produce to the Funkytown Mindful Market, and they will have our produce available for sale as well. We are so excited to be serving our Historic Southside neighbors.
Y’all stay warm tonight and have sweet dreams of fresh Spring veggies!
Welcome to the first day of meteorological Spring! I’ve always considered myself a more astronomical Spring kind of guy but given that this has been one of the hottest winters on record for North Texas I’ll claim this as the first day of Spring 2026. The two-week forecast carries beyond the last predicted frost date so I’m going to gamble with some Spring planting before the rain finally comes. It’s also been one of the driest winters on record so I’m loving the rainy forecast for the latter half of this week.
Opal’s Farm has only been able to make a couple of market dates in February because of some freezing damage to our winter crops earlier in the month. The greens and root crops have started coming back and new plants are about ready to harvest. We’re hoping to have a great selection of veggies for the Grand Opening of Opal’s Farm Stand at Rosedale and Evans later this month.
We also started the Taste the C.U.R.E. program at the end of January, so I’m now taking two Saturdays to teach the growing portion of the program for our Fort Worth folks (we’ve expanded the program to include Stephenville this year!). We have some great students this year and they’re hard at work on their garden plots so we can begin planting this month.
Unfortunately, new growth and expansion also created unexpected problems – mainly staffing of both classes, market stands, and volunteers on Saturday morning. I can’t be in two places at once so Opal’s will be hiring a new Saturday market person in the next month. I’m still working on the details of the new position and will open applications in the next couple of weeks. Thanks to Texas Health Community Hope for making that financially possible for us!
Texas Health Community Hope (formerly known as Blue Zones Fort Worth) has been a sponsor of Opal’s Farm since day one. They’ve helped Opal’s in more ways than I can count. Their support has taken many forms; grants, community farm tours, volunteer days, marketing, and the Double-Up Bucks programs. I hope they know how blessed and how grateful Opal’s Farm is to have them as a partner and supporter. I couldn’t do this every day without them.
We Love Our Volunteers
Yesterday, I also had one of our other incredible partners out for a Volunteer Day – Fidelity Investments. Fidelity started volunteering with Opal’s two years ago and the volunteers have come back over and over again to work at the farm. They also set up monthly volunteer Saturdays for the remainder of the year! I had such a great group yesterday. They mulched most of the bio-intensive section, weeded, and planted onions (My back loves them!). I’m looking forward to seeing everyone in a couple of weeks.
If you’d like to volunteer at Opal’s Farm, please sign up on our website (www.unityunlimited org/opalsfarm or call the farm at 817.602.8225. If you’re looking for group volunteer days, please hurry as Spring dates are going fast!
Thanks to everyone who braved the cold to come to Cowtown Farmers Market Saturday. I guess we needed the reminder that it’s still January in Texas and not to get too comfortable with the seventy-degree days that have marked much of this Texas winter. According to the Old Farmer’s Almanac, our last frost date is March 21st, so we still have a couple of months of winter to go. Just because it is winter doesn’t mean that the farmers market and farm stand won’t have any great produce available though. It’s a great time of year for root crops like beets and carrots or greens like collards, turnip greens, and salad mixes!
I’d also like to ask anyone who volunteered at Opal’s Farm last year to please get in contact with me. As many of you know, our Volunteer Coordinator left in November without notice. She failed to send the updated volunteer list. I know most of our corporate partners, but I would love to have everyone’s contact information to keep you all aware of special volunteer events as well as the new Opal’s Farm monthly newsletter starting in February.
We’re getting closer to the Grand Opening of Opal’s Farm Stand at our new location at the corner of Rosedale and Evans in Historic Southside. We’ll be there with bells on February 14th, Valentine’s Day, from 1 PM to 4PM.
Please remember that Opal’s Farm Stand is an authorized SNAP retailer and offers the Double Up Bucks program to stretch your SNAP dollar even further for fresh local produce. We’re excited and can’t wait to serve our neighbors in Historic Southside.
We’re so grateful to Texas Health Community Hope for administering the Double Up Food Bucks program here in DFW and the statewide program administrator, the Sustainable Food Center. They’ve been a fantastic partner to both us and other urban farms in Fort Worth. Look for several coming events such as cooking demonstrations and nutritional education in the coming year.
Tomorrow, January 19th, is the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day of Service and once again, Texas Health is having groups come out to the farm to volunteer and help us get ready for Spring. We are so thankful to the Texas Health employees who come out several times a year, but especially on this important day when we honor the legacy of Dr. King through serving our community.
If your company would like to schedule a volunteer day, please let me know as soon as you can. The Spring schedule is starting to fill up. We love and appreciate all our volunteers and the amazing work they help us do!
My first year at Opal’s Farm was interesting to say the least. I’d never farmed. I’d had lots of experience with community gardens, but I had never farmed. I only had a few hand tools and a BCS two-wheeled tractor, a wide-open space to use it, and I was the only laborer to do so. There was no money in the farm account and even what little seed we had was donated. That also meant I didn’t get paid unless some grant money came through or we had a huge harvest – neither of which appeared to be happening soon.
Fortunately, I had a great mentor come into my life, Charlie Blaylock, who owned Shines Farmstand, guided me through the process of becoming a farmer. A month into the project I received help from our first volunteer, Brendan, who stayed with me every day through that first growing season. He put that BCS tractor to work. Although our first growing season met with some moderate success it was nowhere near enough to get paid so I went without a paycheck for the first year.
I believed in the farm. My wife and I had a very small savings account to draw on, and although it wasn’t near enough to pay all the bills, I went to work each day. The money finally ran out in October, and I was so worried and stressed out to the point that I came home and told Margaret that I was going to have to go work elsewhere. My wife, who is one of the most spiritual and faithful people I know, looked at me and said, “Greg, we prayed for a long time about this, and I know this is where God wants you to be. Give it another month before you decide what to do”.
I exclaimed, “Baby, we’ll lose the house if we can’t make the mortgage payment!”
She smiled and simply said, “We had a roof over our heads when we moved in didn’t we?” Needless to say, I’m still there seven years later and the farm is thriving.
You see, I received a call from our Executive Director at eight o’clock the following morning. She told me we’d received a grant from Visit Fort Worth, and she’d have a check for me later that day. I called my wife and told her the great news and stopped to have a little conversation with God. “God, I’m stubborn and thickheaded. I know you told me not to worry about things like that. You have my back. It’s all yours from now on. I’m just going to do the work you gave me each day and you take care of the rest.”
I’ve told this story many times over the last seven years. I’ve even had to remind myself several times this year when funding cuts led to staff layoffs and irregular paychecks. Texas Health Community Hope and the Conservation and Environment Fund at North Texas Community Foundation stepped up to help us in enormous ways to continue the great work at Opal’s Farm.
I’d like to say that my life is free of worry, but that would be a lie. I just worry less about myself and more about others. It seems there’s a lot to worry about these days with all the chaos, hatred, and harm being directed at folks, but doing what I can to ease another’s burden, especially in food justice and serving the marginalized communities around us, there’s less worry and more action.
I don’t worry (well, most of the time anyway…) about results and just do the work. I also remember I spent way too much of life worrying about things that just didn’t matter. I have “enough” and life’s pretty damn good.
From another patron saint of Texas music and one of Fort Worth’s favorite sons – Delbert McClinton along with the great Francine Reed.
“There are two ways to get enough: one is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.” – G. K. Chesterton
“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.” – Winston Churchill
“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seed you plant.” – Robert Louis Stevenson
“The world says, the more you take, the more you have. Christ says, the more you give, the more you are.” — Frederick Buechner
I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving holiday. We had a wonderful day with food, family, and Dallas Cowboys football, I normally have a little anxiety around family gatherings being the introvert that I am. My social battery tends to run low after a couple of hours, but this year it lasted from around two in the afternoon until after ten o’clock in the evening. I normally am worn out after being around people, even loved ones for so long. This year was different. I was tired, but happy to have spent our time together. Something special happened this year that been somewhat absent in the past.
One of my wife’s family traditions is to take time between Thanksgiving dinner and dessert to read a passage of scripture and go around the table and have each person tell what they are grateful for. I won’t go into details except to tell you that each of us found deeper appreciation for each other and the grace we’ve been given. This year the passage was from I Thessalonians 5:16-18, “Be cheerful no matter what; pray all the time; thank God no matter what happens. This is the way God wants you who belong to Christ Jesus to live” (The Message Bible). Good advice to everyone no matter what their faith I’d say.
No matter what happens. Most of us find it easy to be grateful when things are going well for us. It’s equally easy to take the good times for granted, but we’re going to focus on gratitude only here. Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines gratitude as: “Gratitude noun – the state of being grateful.” When everything seems to be okay – the rent’s paid, there’s food on the table, we can afford a nice vacation or a new car – it’s easy to have a grateful state of mind, but what happens when tragedy strikes – the death of a loved one, unemployment, financial fear, the old car breaks down – and everything and everyone seems to be against us.
My youngest son, Jeremy, died in May of 2020. Let me be clear, I am not grateful for his death. It’s one of the most difficult things I’ve ever experienced. Parents who have lost a child know what I mean. The grief feels insurmountable and honestly, I don’t think it ever goes away. I still have moments when a song is played, I glance at one of his paintings, or my grandkids talk about how much they miss him when the sadness burst into my day and I feel as emotionally raw as the day I received the phone that he was gone. It’s a constant reminder of loss. It feels sacrilegious, or even hateful, to find gratitude in such a thing.
However, there’s immense gratitude for what happened after Jeremy died. God had placed all the people in my life that would help me walk through this tragedy. My friend and sponsor, Edgar, had lost his own son some twenty-two years earlier. He was the second person I called (the first was my wife) as I drove to my oldest granddaughter’s house to tell her the news. Over the following months he answered every phone call and walked me through the pain. He had been there before. He shared my pain and gave of himself to offer healing and hope during a dark time.
Moreover, two of our friend’s circle lost their sons as well, one to an opiate overdose like Jeremy. I could share with him the little experience I had. Helping others helps me. We were all there for one another – something I will be eternally grateful for.
Most recently, this last year has been one I don’t wish to repeat for a myriad of reasons. Funding cuts began in January. I had to lay off my staff. My paychecks were few and far between causing huge financial difficulty for both the farm and our personal finances.
In April, I blew my left knee out. Subsequent doctor appointments revealed that both knees were now bone on bone, a knee replacement was my last option, and pain became a daily issue. The farmers markets have been much slower, a reflection of a weakening economy, and sales have been down. In October, my Volunteer Coordinator quit suddenly with no explanation. After five years she had become a friend, and her loss was hurtful. I now had to give up Saturday morning markets to be there for volunteers already on the schedule. To make matters worse, my planned knee surgery fell through and it would be next November before I could again take time off for recovery. There were more than a few dark days for me. Why would anyone find gratitude in such a year?
I scaled back, took on only what I could handle, and we’ve had more volunteer groups than in past years. What wasn’t sold was donated to some great local organizations and we’ve still managed to keep moving forward. We still yielded produce totals like the year before with less land and labor. Funding has increased (we’re a non-profit farm) and new market opportunities have arisen to help us better meet our mission of improving food access for our neighbors. We saw new grants relieve the payroll anxiety thanks to Texas Health Community Hope and the North Texas Communities Foundation (more on that to come this week!) we are greeting the new year on a firm footing.
I’ve been able to let go of the hurt (it’s taken awhile) and disruption of (our Volunteer Coordinator) Stacey’s sudden departure and work with some amazing volunteers I’d been missing for the last few months. My knees still hurt but not like they were. Work is much more tolerable. A bit slower perhaps but that may be age over injury. Who’s to say?
I’m grateful for what this year has brought to me. I’m still out there every day doing the best I can and far better than expected. I’m able to keep moving and I’ve learned that my physical (and sometimes emotional) limits are not nearly as bad as I thought. I’m getting much better at thanking God “no matter what happens”.
It’s often simply a matter of perspective – whether one sees difficulty as a problem or as an opportunity. Living in a state of gratitude helps shift one’s perspective. Sometimes I only learn to be grateful looking back at how God had blessed and stood by me. One of my favorite quotes is from Steve Jobs’ 2005 Stanford commencement speech, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward “. Many times, I stumble through the dark times until I look back and see how I’ve been loved and cared for. I’m getting better staying in the moment…
There’s an abundance of studies and articles about the benefits of gratitude, but I choose a very simple definition: gratitude isn’t just a noun. The dictionary may not say it, but it’s a verb as well. It’s not just a state of mind, but an action word. Sometimes placing one foot in front of another is the simplest form of gratitude one can have. My prayer for us all is that we may truly come to “Thank God no matter what happens”.
gregoryjoel.com 