June 25, 2025
What a blessing it was for the Calvary Episcopal Church Food Pantry to be the recipient of the "Love Erin" outreach program on Saturday. Christie Pickel, the mother, shared the family's mission- "Love Erin" is to continue to share Erin's love and light to those in need. Twelve members of Erin's family gathered to donate needed items (a wagon filled with ramen noodles and canned fruit), shop with the pantry neighbors, and assist with carry out.... filling 106 shopping carts with food and supplies. Our pictures this week represent the passion that filled our pantry on Saturday.
We are now participating in the bi-weekly opportunity to receive food from Manna. On Wednesday, we received meat, cereal, lots of eggs, and some onions and potatoes. Look at the pictures for the tower of food we received.
On Thursday, a group of parishioners from St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Columbia, SC delivered 201 pounds of snacks for our school age children. Items donated were to provide additional healthy fruit, juice, and snacks for the student's lunch boxes.
We welcomed 106 families representing 400 individuals and six new families. The six new families represent a total of twenty-two family members. We continue to need volunteers who can help with Spanish registrations. Once a month would be very helpful!
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
From The Lord’s Acre of Fletcher
Thank You’s to:
Martha Vining, who is keeping up the harvest almost daily this week. She has picked over 100 pounds of yellow squash and cucumbers as of Monday.
Dick Ackman's crew, who spread wood chips and gathered up the silage tarps last week.
The Gardens of Hope cancer survivor group, who finished up their first eight-week session last week, having put in lots of work planting, harvesting and weeding the early summer garden.
REAL Tomatoes
I'm currently at Ocean Isle Beach, sizzling with family.
On the way down, we stopped at a produce market that clearly did not yet have local heirloom tomatoes for sale. All they had were Florida 47s, a commercial variety offered by large growers in Florida and Georgia. They were beautiful, uniformly red, perfectly round and firm. They were also almost completely tasteless. They're bred that way so that growers can pick them green, gas them with ethylene gas to get then to color up and ship them to Wisconsin (or Fletcher) for shoppers who want a perfect-looking tomato in February.
In the Lord's Acre garden, we take a different approach. Since we only ship two-hundred yards to the pantry and we don't try to deliver tomatoes in the winter or even grow Barbie tomatoes in season, we are able to grow heirloom and "heirloom-type" tomatoes that don't last forever and don't look perfect, but the taste is out of this world. We make compromises on uniformity and durability, but our tomatoes do not compromise on taste. Pantry clients deserve the very best, and the Lord's Acre tomatoes, which will start coming in a week or two, are our best shot.
— Doug
