Food Pantry

I promise I will go back to the chicken coop and finish my series, but I feel like I must talk about this.

We had our first food pantry give away Thursday that included fresh produce from my Dad’s garden. We already had a decent sized box to give away, but with hunger at a seemingly all – time high we needed more.

Of all the “main garden” we use for the food pantry, we had onions and leaf lettuce ready. The cabbage was still 2 -3 weeks away, with everything else still needing time. But boy did we have lettuce and onions! We had three rows of onions 75 feet long and 2 rows of leaf lettuce 4 feet wide and 75 feet long.

The onions were easy enough to pick. Myself and miss whitaker’s grandson in law took care of them in 30 minutes or less. In all there were 500 head of onions!!!! Luckily we borrowed a truck or my car would have never smelled the same again.

The lettuce was a bigger issue. It took 2 days with my mom and dad and myself going at it with knives and scissors for roughly 8 hours. We either had extreme heat or pouring rain so we couldnt just get on the job and stay on it. All in all there was roughly lbs of lettuce. It took 2 trips in my car filled to the brim in drivers seat, back seat, and trunk.

The day of the giveaway we had lots of volunteers who washed and sorted the produce as well as giving away the boxes. There were some lulls in traffic, but we ended up having 115 families to show up. All of the food was devastated. Hardly a scrap of anything was left.

We had a couple of the kind none of us like to see, the kind who really act hateful towards you, or seem unappreciative. BUT, 99% of those folks all were so thankful and glad for the help it made the day very refreshing. We signed up a ton of new folks as well, as I stated before- the need is growing.

Next month we are hoping to have cucumbers, cabbage, peppers, beans, and tons of stuff.

However, I need to figure out what to plant in the place of these onions now- more onions? Mustard greens?

My Dad picking lettuce for Food Bank

My geese guarding the cabbage- the actually eat the weeds and not the cabbage!

Some of the loot at the giveaway

Volunteers at the giveaway!

Some of the produce before we took it to the pantry!