09/09/2024
The church garden won People Choice 🥇and Community Garden 🥈in the Columbus Dispatch’s Backyard Garden Contest. A pair of our Sunday School children accepted the prizes on behalf of our hard working gardeners.
Description
In mid April a Franklin County Master Gardener gifted our community garden at Saint Andrew Christian Church with a huge box of seed potatoes and some onion sets. We enlisted our Sunday School children to plant 3 rows of potatoes in the church garden along with a row of onions. In mid July we invited those same children to start digging for potatoes. Imagine their surprise, delight, and joy when they uncovered huge potatoes that grew from tiny pieces of the seed potatoes! In our garden, in addition to the potatoes and onions, we grow cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, turnips, radishes, eggplant, and several varieties of peppers. Almost all of our fresh produce is donated to our local food bank, Help My Neighbor on Smokey Row Road. Last year we donated over 1600 pounds of vegetables to Help My Neighbor. But the story does not stop there. We had such an excess of potatoes that we enlisted the Help of our congregation. Many of them took seed potatoes and onions home to grow in their gardens. But we still had potatoes and onions to spare. We called upon our Scout Troops 332, 7332, and Pack 333 to adopt some potatoes. All were given instructions on how to care for the potatoes. We have requested that they return the harvest to the church for donation to the food bank. We are calling this project "Loaves and Fishes " after the miracle that Jesus performed turning 5 loaves of bread and 2 fishes into enough food to feed a multitude.