Wado to Central Texas Cherokee Township for our Grow Corn, Grow Communities a Hominy Making Workshop
On Sunday, October 19, 2025, Doug Martin and his son spoke, taught, cooked, and shared stories with our Children and Youth Religious Education (CYRE) class and after church with the congregation and community in the Wildflower Community Room. What powerful (and yummy) indigenous lessons and wisdom corn offers about working together, identity, history, the future, and so much more.
Thank you to Central Texas Cherokee Township for this collaboration and mutual community support of our Three Sisters Garden.
Join us for an afternoon of transformation: it’s time to prepare and eat our community garden’s corn!
Sunday, October 19, 1:30 pm – 3:30 pm Community Room of Wildflower Church 1314 E Oltorf Street, Austin TX 78702
Doug Martin (Central Texas Cherokee Township Three Sisters Program) will show us how to make hominy and grits from field corn (grown in our Three Sisters Garden) and nixtamalization, and share wisdom about the community garden, food sovereignty, and the importance of growing food as a community, interspersed with Cherokee stories and culture, and indigenous foodways. This is an intergenerational cooking demonstration activity open to all ages. Guests and friends are welcome!
Growing Faith and Wildflowers! Let us know you’re planning to attend! RSVP Here.
There is no charge to attend. This event is our gift to the community.
Wildflower member Brandy Nichols displays our first harvest of corn this year from our Faith Garden (a community garden shared by Faith Presbyterian Church, Wildflower Church, and our community friends and neighbors).
The corn is the first crop from our Three Sisters garden plot (which consists of corn, beans, and pumpkins or squash), which was planted in partnership with Central Texas Cherokee Township’s Three Sisters Program.
Gratitude to all the gardeners, including youth and children of Wildflower, who have planted, watered, and tended our crops, together. We are also especially grateful to CTCT’s Doug Martin, for his generosity in sharing gardening knowledge and Cherokee heirloom seeds with our community.
The corn is currently being dried and will later be ground into flour during a food sovereignty workshop which will be planned at a later date in the fall.
Gratitude post for Wildflower youth Tulio for volunteer a few weeks of his summer for a refresh of our library. He spent a few weeks cleaning our community room bookshelves, cataloging books into an online database, moving some of archival materials into storage, and starting to reorganize the collection.
This is such a helpful project, which will help our our staff, worship team, CYRE, ARE, and others find more easily find some of the resources we have. (It’ll also help us to make the collection more accessible to members in the future.)
We had a lovely Blessing of the Backpacks to kick off our new school year — and the fall generally! Everyone left with a “Powered By Love” tag since love is the driving force behind all of our newly adopted values (Justice, Equity, Transformation, Pluralism, Interdependence, & Generosity). The purpose of this tradition is to help remind us that we bring our UU values and Wildflower’s love with us wherever we go.
Here’s an excerpt of the blessing:
Even when you are away from Wildflower, you carry the heart of Unitarian Universalism with you wherever you go.
We bless these charms that will accompany you on your journey.
We bless these charms in the name of Love. May you always remember that you are loved here at Wildflower May you remember to love yourself and to love each other.
May you keep love at the center of all you do.
These charms are to remind you of the support of this community. Transforming can be hard – when times are hard, hold this charm and remember that you can rely on this church and rely on our shared values.
You bring our values with you wherever you go.
Your bag might not look any different or feel any different, but the next time you use your bag I hope you will remember that we’ve added our blessings. And as you pack your bag with all the tools you need each day, think about the blessings you bring with you from your church community. Blessed Be.
Milestone Sunday, May 19, 2024 recognizing the milestones of both our Wildflower church community, and the milestones of our 2024 Wildflower HS Scholarship recipients (open to graduating seniors of Travis ECHS).
