Does your family have a garden? Have you ever had more tomatoes or green beans than your family could eat? Did you ever think that if you saw one more ripe zucchini, you'd scream?
For many people who are hungry, too much zucchini would be a dream come true. In many communities, hungry people visit a food pantry. There they can get canned vegetables, flour, sugar and many other things to eat. But it’s hard for people who don’t have much money and have no place to garden to get fresh fruits and vegetables.
The volunteers who ran one food pantry in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, wanted to be sure people could get fresh produce. So they asked that gardeners bring their extra fruits and vegetables to them.
People from the Bethlehem Presbyterian Church volunteered to help. Then some people gave land that could be used to grow vegetables. It would be a way for people who really needed fresh produce to get it. From that tiny seed of an idea, something wonderful grew: It's called Grow-A Row.
Soon many people, including lots of kids, wanted to help, too. Families in the church signed up to “own” the garden for a week at a time. The "owners" were responsible for watering and weeding the garden. They also harvested and delivered the vegetables to several local food pantries.
Grow-A-Row grew! Groups of 20 or 30 church members and their friends also gleaned left-over and damaged produce from the farm that donated the land. Sometimes they picked over 1,000 pounds of corn at one time!
And still Grow-A-Row kept growing. One year, Grow-a-Row gave 27,000 pounds of fresh produce to local food pantries and food banks. The next year, the kids and adults grew more than twice what they did in the year before, well over 60,000 pounds! Grow-a-Row grew in other ways too: Deacons in the church made home deliveries to cancer patients. Local farms gave damaged produce, and Girl Scouts canned it.
Grown with love, picked with love and given with love. That's the story of Grow-A-Row.
Pray for the families who work in the garden and for the families who are able to get fresh produce from the garden.
by Colleen P. Duerr
Bethlehem Presbyterian Church (Pittstown, N.J.)
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