April 9, 2025
It's always comforting when the Christ School van drives onto our campus filled with students ready to spend the morning with us. They are always ready, willing, and waiting to undertake any task that is needed. Several students are bilingual and they assist with registering new neighbors, others enjoy shopping with our neighbors, while many like the carryout role. Often, they may work in pairs sorting huge cases of mixed items and repackage them for distribution. A "Shout Out" to Christ School!!!
We welcomed 113 families representing 411 individuals and six new families. The six new families represent a total of 24 family members. We continue to need volunteers who can help with Spanish registrations. Once a month would be very helpful!
Volunteer Spotlight this week: Randy and Debbie Markanich and Doug and Ann Arney. Randy and Debbie are very active throughout the community. If you've donated food to the pantry and left it in our foyer, you may have noticed a tower of boxes in the corner. There's an old movie, The Hunt for Red October, well...we are always "on the hunt" for Ingles milk boxes for Saturday mornings. Randy and Debbie travel around the area collecting boxes. It takes at least 260 each week for the shoppers on Saturdays. Debbie welcomes our neighbors on Saturday mornings in the gathering room and calls the numbers for their turn to shop. Randy enjoys working in produce and assisting with pantry work during the weekdays. They're very active at Nativity working in the garden, other church activities, and volunteering at Transformation Village. Doug and Ann can be found on Manna delivery weeks. Doug recruits parishioners from Fletcher Methodist, the "Panther Football team's front line" (in the writer's opinion.) Just in March, we received 10,324 pounds of food from Manna. Doug's team assists with moving the pallets piled high with food into the pantry and place it on the racks. It's a mammoth job!!! Ann assists with checking the 155+ cartons of eggs, and bagging produce. During Hurricane Helene aftermath she helped sort through the many generous donations. Doug and Ann are also very active at Fletcher Methodist with the outreach programs from the October Pumpkins to preparing food for the many church events, concerts, celebrations.
On behalf of our Pantry Board, we express our heartfelt gratitude for your generous food and monetary donations to our pantry. Your donations will make a significant impact on the lives of those in our community who are struggling with food insecurity.
- Kathy Noyes, for the Executive Committee
News from The Lord’s Acre of Fletcher – Why a second hoop house? Our new 60’x20’ hoop house kit should arrive in the next week or so and will be completed by Dick Ackman’s wonderful work crew in a month to six weeks.
This second hoop house will allow us to develop a winter lettuce supply to address the loss of Tractor Farms’ regular offerings to the pantry. (They are moving to Georgia.) It will also allow us to rotate our summer tomatoes and peppers yearly to minimize disease.
Fun fact: the new hoop house will have a double layer of plastic, with a gap maintained between the layers by a small blower. This significantly increases the insulating value of the hoop house, further extending winter growing possibilities.
