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ORAL HISTORY

Cath Conlon

Raised in the Valley town of Raymondville, Texas, Cath Conlon credits her Grandmother with introducing her to the natural world. Remembering the summers she spent on her cotton farm as formative, the work they did together taught her to live in the present and notice her surroundings. For this, when faced with the challenge of raising a son in Central Houston, she says, “The most important thing in my mind was for this child to be ecologically literate.” Driven by this desire, she obtained some old family land outside the city near Waller and in 1990 invited her son’s first grade class out to the property for a field trip to help build a garden. It became a weekly occurrence that over the years organically bloomed into Blackwood Educational Land Institute. “We are a teaching farm,” she says. “I like to say that we are soil farmers before we’re any kind of food farmer, because if we’re doing right by the soil, any food that we grow will make us better.” She also adds- “You can talk about nature all day and never talk about food, but you can’t talk about food without talking about nature because that’s where it comes from.”