November 8, 2023

Reflections from the fall are numerous. Students volunteered from the Global Lens Club at Hendersonville High School to the Day of Caring students from Christ School. We welcomed Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Pharmacy Interns, Lion's Club, a Deerfield constituency of enthusiastic weekly volunteers, ArdenWoods residents who sponsored a successful Hunger Walk, introduced bulk ordering ensuring that we meet our goal to provide eleven meals a week, and celebrated with our volunteers at a Garden and Pantry Appreciation cookout...just to mention a few highlights.

As we have moved from daylight saving time and shorter daylight, we will be harvesting the last of the collards in the next few weeks. Last Thursday at 4:00, we met to plant the beets and lettuce which are housed in the hoop house. To plant these fragile seedlings, place them in our fertile organic soil, and watch as creation takes place during late fall and our winter months is a miraculous experience. Our neighbors will benefit from fresh produce throughout the winter.

On Saturday, we served 146 households representing 519 individuals and welcomed seven new families. We announced to our neighbors that on November 18 our Thanksgiving meal will be included after regular shopping. If you would like to make a donation, we are collecting stuffing mix, cranberry sauce, and gravy. The other items have been ordered in bulk. Any monetary donations for turkeys are appreciated and can be mailed to Calvary Episcopal Church Food Pantry P.O. Box 187 Fletcher, NC 28752.

Donations this week included Bimbos and City Bakery with bread and bakery items. Bright Farms donated 25 cases of salad. Other donors include. Flavor-First-tomatoes , peppers, squash, zucchinis, cucumbers, Wal-Mart and Big Lots, misc items and food, Project Dignity-feminine products, Humane Society- dog/cat food and Milk Co-milk. Nativity Lutheran, Fletcher UMC, Calvary Episcopal, the Tabernacle of Praise Churches, and other anonymous donors contributed their time, food, and misc. items during the week.

On behalf of the Executive Committee, thank you to our volunteers and our area churches, civic groups, local merchants, and families for all you do to feed our community helping to reduce food insecurity. We thank you and appreciate your food and monetary donations.

— Kathy Noyes

News from the lord’s acre, fletcher

NO WORK SESSION THIS WEEK

There’s a final picking of collards to come in a few weeks, but not THIS week. I’ll let you know when it’s ready. In the meantime, this is the last regular weekly email for the Lord’s Acre Fletcher garden this year. I’ll send an occasional invitation to harvest collards, or sometime in winter, beets and lettuce in the hoop house.

Thanks so much for showing up in the garden this year, and for all the other ways you support the good work of the Lord’s Acre. God bless you!

An intersection with the natural world

We humans are rediscovering our dependence on the natural world, an awareness we have lost in the last few hundred years as our technological prowess has grown into a kind of arrogance about our relationship with nature, as if the natural world was just a bank of endless resources for our use. We now know different. The natural world has its own integrity. We serve it; it serves us.

That's all to say that I love the places where the natural world and the human project clearly overlap. One of those is the Lord's Acre, Fletcher garden. The basic energies of creation, a true gift of God, are right in front of us: living soil, seed bursting forth into verdant growth, the decomposition of spent plants that becomes life for a whole world of micro-creatures that makes that soil alive and provides nutrients for that growing plant.

LAF workers are at this crux between God's creative energies and the human desire to shape those energies into food people want to eat, in our case into food people need for their well-being. We serve it; it serves us.

This prayer by John Philip Newell shows the graced place we humans inhabit in God's creation, something of which I am keenly aware in the garden.

At the beginning of the day

We seek your countenance among us,

O God,

In the countless forms of creation

all around us

in the sun’s rising glory

in the face of friend and stranger.

Your presence within every presence

your Light within all light

your Heart at the heart of this moment.

May the fresh light of morning