March 1, 2023
The Community Foundation of Henderson County awarded the Calvary Episcopal Church Food Pantry $14,348.00 to construct a hoophouse to be placed strategically in the garden. This grant ultimately allows for a longer growing season in the garden providing fresh produce for our neighbors on Saturday mornings. What an exciting morning on Tuesday when a large truck southbound from Ohio delivered a massive amount of items to be assembled. Yes..."Some assembly required." Did you enjoy Lincoln Logs, Tinker Toys, or Legos as a child? Then you might enjoy this project on a bit larger scale. Contact Doug Kearney if you are interested at wdkearney@gmail.com
Dan, number distributor, was bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as he distributed numbers to over 40 neighbors who arrived before 6:00 a.m. on Saturday morning. We welcomed 104 families, representing 391 individuals, and greeted three new families who received food for the first time with us. Fred reported that for the month of February 445 different households visited the pantry representing 1,570 individuals. The total for the first two months is 901 Households and 3,133 individuals. Thanks to grants for food and your donations we were able to feed all our neighbors 3 and 1/2 days of food or 11 meals.
Many of you may not know but it takes a minimum of 35 volunteers for us to provide an efficient distribution of food on Saturdays. Thank you to our adult and student volunteers this past Saturday who helped make the day successful. Father Roberts drove a van full of eager Christ School students to assist on Saturday. We are appreciative for the hours of service they have provided over the years working often in the garden and pantry. We welcomed too, the Girl Scouts from North Buncombe High School who have volunteered with us this year. They also volunteer to represent the Beta Club.
Panera Bread donated bread and rolls this week. City Bakery donated loaves of bread. Other donated items were from Bright Farms-lettuce, Ingles and Bimbos-bread, Wal-Mart-misc items, Flavor-First peppers and tomatoes, and MilCo-milk. Friday, our volunteers stocked the shelves with purchased items from MANNA and Sav-Mor (canned goods, milk, and eggs). Manna provided at no cost fresh produce including sweet potatoes. cabbage, onions. cucumbers, turnips, zucchini, apples, and squash.
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.
Kathy Noyes
News from The Lord’s Acre, Fletcher & Doug Kearney
Work Sessions Resume in March!
Spring has not arrived, but the time to prepare for spring has. Work sessions resume the second week of March. Garden volunteers are invited Saturday, March 11, from 9 to 10:30 a.m. and on Thursday, March 16, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. We are adding the Saturday session to accommodate some who cannot come on weekdays. (We do not expect regular pantry volunteers to come to the garden on Saturdays. They are needed in the pantry.)
Our first tasks will be to weed and put compost on planting beds in preparation for planting collards and lettuce in April.
If you have not volunteered in the past, we really could use you in the garden. We are expanding the scope of the garden this year and need to expand our volunteer base as well. It's great fellowship with others and God. No gardening experience is required.
A Hoophouse for the LAF Garden
We are upping our game in the garden this year. Thanks to the Community Foundation of Henderson Country, the Lord's Acre, Fletcher is adding to its garden space a 20' x 60' hoophouse that will extend our growing season by up to two months and give us the ability, because of raised beds, to grow root crops that have so far been off the table because of our rocky soil.
We expect the hoophouse to be up and running by the end of March. Come by and see it. Even better, come by and work in it!
Why I Do This Thing
Occasionally, after too long taxing my non-quantitatively inclined mind with figuring out when and how many lettuce seeds to sow per foot of bed to get 75 heads harvested by May 1, I have to step back and recall how this tedium is related to God's dream.
Duke theologian Norman Wirzba says in Making Peace with the Land, "Christian reconciliation is about bringing all bodies into a peaceful, life-promoting and convivial relationship with each other…. It is all of creation or none of it that God will save. Human life simply makes no sense apart from the life of all creation. We live only because the worms, plants and bees do too. And they live because God loves them."
Working in the LAF garden is part of God's work, reconciling the world to itself and to God. The garden is a place where we are "re-membered" to God's creation, human and other-than-human. And our planting, weeding, and harvesting is a participation in God's love fleshed out in this wonderful web of life of which we are a part. -- Doug
A New Tool Arrives
The LAF garden now has a wheeled garden seeder that makes a furrow, plants seeds at pre-determined spacing and depth, then covers the seed and firms the soil all in one pass. With the garden at nearly a quarter of an acre, it's time to look to a few time-savers (and back-savers) for our precious volunteers.
In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. —Margaret Atwood
