The Kitchen: A Seed Catalog, a Hymnal, and the Holiest Room in Any Church

May 2026

We have a theory about churches. The holiest room in any of them is the kitchen — the place where the feeding actually happens. Everything else is preparation for that.

So it made sense that when the time came to do something with ours, we'd make it worthy of the work.

---

Where it started

The kitchen came with the building: a big U-shaped run of old oak cabinets, plain and solid, doing their job without calling any attention to themselves. Which is all well and good for a kitchen that just needs to function. But we had a different idea.

Every year we order our seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds — their catalog is a work of art in its own right, thick with photographs of every variety they carry, sorted by color and season and family. We had the new catalog on the counter, and BJ started looking at it differently.

---

The process

BJ cut out every single picture from the catalog. Every one.

Then he sorted them by color across the chapel floor — the whole nave spread out like a seed-catalog stained-glass window, thousands of images organized into the spectrum from deep violet through red, orange, yellow, and green. It took a while. The chapel floor is large enough, just barely.

The cabinets came off the wall. He painted them forest green — the bones of the piece. Then the real work began: building a continuous mural across the entire run of doors, panel by panel, each one a chapter in the same story.

The image he landed on was the world above and below ground at once — the way a seed sees it. Above the root line: bloom, branch, and the full riot of the growing season, moving through the color spectrum from the cool violet of the night-side panels into the warm fire-reds and golds of the day. Below: the root world, dark and rich and intricate, the underground half of everything we eat. A river line of hand-painted grey runs through the middle, the horizon between the two worlds.

Each door panel carries a Sri Yantra — the sacred geometry of nourishment — hand-painted over the collage once the Mod Podge had dried, BJ's own mark over the thousands of seeds and fruits and leaves underneath.

The result is not a kitchen backsplash. It is a continuous panorama — eight feet long, floor to counter — of everything the Baker Creek catalog grows, sorted into a single image of the whole living world.

---

The countertops

The hymnals the congregation left behind in the pews when the church closed — dozens of them, old and beautiful — had been sitting in boxes. We weren't going to throw them out, and we weren't going to just put them on a shelf.

We pulled two of them apart, page by page, and laid the pages out across the counter surface. Hymns, choral notation, scripture, the names of songs most people know by heart. Then we poured resin over the whole thing and let it cure flat and clear.

Now when we prep dinner from the garden — cutting the tomatoes, shelling the beans, working through whatever came in that day — we're doing it over How Great Thou Art and Be Thou My Vision and all the rest. The words are right there under the cutting board.

Val often talks about moving the countertops up to the sanctuary wall where more people could see them. And we understand that. But we think they're exactly where they belong. The feeding is the sacred thing. The kitchen is the sanctuary.

---

The seed catalog that inspired all of this is the Baker Creek Whole Seed Catalog — you'll find a link to it in our footer. Worth ordering just to look at, before you cut it up.