What a pleasure it was to have youth from Atlanta, Glenn Memorial Methodist Church, spend the morning with us on Tuesday! They are part of the Asheville Youth Ministry experience. The youth picked 100 pounds of produce from the garden. On Saturday, our neighbors will be offered green beans, cherry tomatoes, and yellow squash. Later in the morning they had a tour of the pantry and helped bag the green beans for distribution. They topped the morning off with a picnic on our campus.

We appreciate our community for stopping by during the week to leave food donations in our pantry foyer. A nice surprise this summer has been the folks who stop by and share the bounty from their gardens. One of our goals is to offer healthy choices for neighbor meals. We try to provide 3 1/2 days of food or 11 meals to each family.

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.

For The Executive Committee

Kathy Noyes

News from The Lord’s Acre of Fletcher – July 23, 2024

Happy Bean Pickers We LOVE youth groups who come to work in the Lord's Acre! Special thanks to the Asheville Youth Mission program and high school youth from Glenn Memorial United Methodist Church in Atlanta, who spent almost two hours in the hot sun picking green beans, yellow squash, and tomatoes, and dodging oblivious bees, for a total harvest of 100 pounds! They cooled off for another hour in the pantry, bagging the produce for Saturday distribution.

Summer Decline As we enter late summer, we experience the inevitable decline of summer crops. Squash gets vine borers and powdery mildew, cucumber plants get bacterial wilt, beans get bean beetles, and tomatoes, especially heirlooms that pantry clients like, get the dreaded early (and late) blight. It's inevitable. Good practices can delay the onset. But ultimately, it's inevitable. (As I write, the tomatoes and cucumbers are gone, but the yellow squash is having a remarkable run this year.)

If you want to know one reason the hoop house is such a boon to our garden, look at these photos. On the left, Cherokee purple tomatoes in the field, decimated by early blight. On the right, the same variety in the hoop house with no sign of blight. The difference? The hoop house keeps rain, a vector of the blight fungus, off the leaves. Hmmm, we may need another hoop house.

Doug Kearney, Garden Manager

July 24, 2024