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Matt loves to garden

Dirt under His Fingernails

Matt Schroeder is a guy who remembers where he came from. From Schroeder to Schroeder. From farmer to garden-tiller. From tiny seed of faith to red August tomato. From dust to dust.

Grandpa was a crop farmer, the second of 17 children all born in a two-room farmhouse near Coal Valley. Dad was one of seven siblings, brought up on that Henry County farm. “Farming is in our blood,” says Matt. “It’s like a big clan thing. From my earliest memory, Dad always had a large vegetable garden. We moved from place to place and there was always a plot to go with it.”

As a little boy, Matt would perch on an upturned five-gallon bucket, staring down a daunting row of peas. “It seemed very long to me, maybe 50 yards,” he recalls. “I picked until the bucket was full, dumped it out, and started all over again.”

Today, “eating local” is a movement that reacts to a contemporary food culture in which the average strawberry or green bean travels 1,500 miles from fork to table. But for the Schroeder family of seven during Matt’s childhood, eating local was a matter of integrity and economy. Not much reached the canning jar or deep freeze. They ate lettuce, asparagus, and broccoli warm from the garden.

On Pinehill Road in Bettendorf, half of Matt and Leigh Ann Schroeder’s backyard is tilled for garden growing. “It’s not glamorous but it’s fun. I like to do it,” says Matt. “You can’t screw it up. I plant by trial and error. If it doesn’t grow, you plant something else, or you water it, or you fertilize. You just keep doing it ’til it grows.”

Tomatoes, broccoli, peppers, and pyramids of green beans are Matt’s produce of choice. And there’s the matter of some giant cabbages coming his way via a school project of daughters Lauren and Olivia.

But this is more than a salad bowl heaped with fresh spring greens or a steaming pot of just-picked string beans — as good as that is. For Matt, it’s groundedness. It’s the simplicity and daily grace of hard work. It’s dirt under the fingernails. It’s family.

When the full Schroeder clan gathers, it’s a bit like the riot of growth and abundance in an August gar- den. The house teems with brothers and sisters, parents, aunts and uncles, 31 first cousins. “I love it when all these people show up. Bring ’em in! I look in the mirror and know we share this direct close resemblance,” says Matt of a family heritage that passes along faith, church commitment, and common practices. “You don’t have to prove anything to all these people. You’re already accepted.”

Matt’s daily work is far removed from farm field or backyard garden — or maybe not so much. He’s customer service representative at The Brandt Company in Davenport. There he tracks projects from digital file to printing press, into boxes and out the door.

He’s not afraid to learn robust new software. Matt rolls up his sleeves, steps gingerly into a challenge, and gets his hands dirty. Daily he plants seeds of new ideas with customers and employees, hoping they’ll germinate into effective processes in a highly-competitive printing industry. Sometimes it’s a bit like sitting on that five-gallon bucket and staring at that overwhelm- ingly long row of peas. But he just starts in.

When Matt gets home after a paper-and-ink day in the plant, he digs in the dirt. “I’d like to say I have more control in my garden,” he chuckles. “But I don’t. It’s all about putting faith into a seed, that you’ll get something out of it. When I have more than we can eat, I like to pass it on to others, just like my dad did.”

Faith, like a seed that falls on fertile ground, is passed from generation to generation of Schroeders, and now to Lauren (8) and Olivia (5).

For years, Matt has spent his Sunday evenings at St. Paul, cultivating relationships with high school youth. Alongside them, he has raked leaves, traveled to New Orleans by bus, cooked breakfast for a camp retreat. Much like gardening, he simply likes it. It’s fun.

Matt describes himself as “not glamorous, simple, low maintenance, expansive (like the Schroeder clan), willing, reliable in whatever is required of me.” He says “yes” easily — “as long as it doesn’t push me too far out of my simpleness.”

This is a man who digs in. He’s grounded in what counts: faith, family, dirt and blue sky. He knows well the holiness of physical labor and the grace of abundant harvest. Breaking clods of dirt with a spade, picking green beans with little girls, watching with satisfaction as a brochure glides off a printing press — in this daily stuff is the practice of faith.

Digging down, connecting with God

“There is no substitute for earthiness. From dust we came and to dust we shall return. The good news is that most of us get some good years in between, during which we may sink our hands in the dirt. This is as good a way as any to recover our connection to the ground of all being.

Digging down is as good a way to God as rising up, if only because you can feel it in your shoulders.”

— Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World

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"For the Benedictine spirit, work is not simply work. Whatever kind of work it is...it has to be good work, work that makes the world a better, more just, more fair, and more humane place for everyone." ~Joan Chittister

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