Spring 2024: Cultivate

A Q&A with The Bookery founder, Mandy Crow, about what we’re cultivating in our lives, our love of new recipes and possible articles coming your way this spring!

Signs of spring are everywhere, and a new season means a new seasonal focus here at The Bookery. This spring, our theme is “Cultivate.” In a time of new growth and fresh starts, we’ll spend the next few months diving into what that looks like for our spiritual lives as well as what it means for our reading lists and our menus. 

To learn more about our Spring 2024 theme, we posed a few questions to our founder, Mandy Crow. 

Let’s dig a little deeper into the theme. What do you mean by “cultivate”? 

Spring is obviously a season of new growth and new life. The trees begin to bud, flowers start blooming and the days grow warmer. I grew up in a farming community, so spring brings to mind the smell of dirt being overturned as farmers begin to prepare their fields for the growing season. One of the beautiful things about the word “cultivate” is that it has a couple of different meanings. It can mean “to acquire or develop,” such as cultivating new skills or habits, but it can also mean “to prepare for growth.” This spring, we’re going to dive into both meanings here at The Bookery. My hope is that this season will help us all to look at our lives and consider what we’re cultivating or nurturing. Am I cultivating hope and joy or nurturing negativity? Are the habits I’m cultivating leading me closer to Jesus or further away? Am I cultivating strong, healthy, God-centered relationships or only focusing on myself and my needs? 

I hope that the content we create this spring helps us all to meditate on what we’re actually cultivating in our lives. More than anything, I hope that this theme encourages our readers (and me, if I’m being honest!) to invest our time and energy in investing in the things that truly matter, like joy, peace, purpose and love.

What about recipes? Can we expect anything new there? 

Well, The Bookery wouldn’t be The Bookery without recipes or the ongoing Cookbook Chronicles series! We love food, and we love cooking around here. We’re hoping to bring back our “Favorite Recipes for Spring” series where we highlight appetizer, salad, entree and dessert recipes that either play on the flavors of spring or make us think of it. We’ve already asked for our community to share some of their favorite Easter recipes, so we hope to share some of those soon. Don’t worry, you’re going to get plenty of recipes here at The Bookery this spring. 

“Cultivate” has some agricultural connotations. Does that mean you’ll include some gardening content?

We’re not adding a new content pillar here at The Bookery, but we’re definitely open to exploring some new directions. We’re in the early stages of article planning for the next few months, but we’d love to tackle some articles on kitchen gardens, herbs and container gardening. So, if you know a great gardening expert we could talk with, definitely send him or her our way! 

From cultivating habits that draw us deeper into relationship with God to checking a few books off our 2024 reading list, we’ve got a lot of exciting things planned for Spring 2024. Check back here often for new articles, recipes and book reviews!