details on Vineyard Boise gardens

Garden O’ Feedin'

The garden vision was started by a couple who saw a way to supplement the Pantry and Feeding God’s Children Ministries. That first year the garden produced $300 worth of veggies, which was enough to help supplement the Pantry with fresh tomatoes and peppers from August to October. Starting with only 4-6 raised beds the garden has grown every year to its current state of 12 garden boxes, 23 raised beds and 6 large mounds and a 4 row field. This is about 1/3 acre which last year produced 20,775.5 pounds of food. It is in production from May through November. The food produced was used to feed 1300 families in the Boise area for a total of 4108 total family members. This was no small task for 115 dedicated volunteers who harvest the night before the Pantry is open. The food is not sold but given in love to those that need it. We are also able to share produce with the Good Samaritan Home. The sight of fresh produce makes them smile as they remember their family gardens.

This year will be an awesome year at the garden. We have added another 1/3 acre with room for flowers as well. A new Greenhouse will also be put in to use here shortly. The sooner plants can be put in the garden the sooner we can start feeding people. Junior Master Gardner Classes will also be offered this year.

Volunteers are always

Boise Vineyard grow organic food for food pantry

> Lifestyle

Linking environmentalism, religion, and free food

Vineyard Boise, an evangelical church in Idaho, focuses on composting, companion planting and bible classes.

By PlentyMag.com

Tue, Mar 24 2009 at 11:33 AM EST

Read more: RELIGION & SPIRITUALITY

Here’s the first thing I like about Bill Meeker, head gardener at the Garden O’ Feedin’, which provides free, fresh, organic food for poor people all over the greater Boise, Idaho, area: When I ask him how his one-third acre of raised beds could possibly have produced 20,776 pounds of vegetables last year, he answers, “Well, God’s involved.”

Indeed. Meeker and 115 volunteers grow their crops on land that abuts Vineyard Boise, a church in aptly-named Boise suburb Garden City, Idaho. Vineyard Boise is evangelical in all the ways that freak out an increasingly secular world. Their long statement of faith (available online) is full of turns like, “We believe that the whole world is under the domination of Satan and that all people are sinners by nature and choice.”

But here’s the second thing I like about Bill Meeker: When other churches visit to ask about setting up their own gardens, he tells them the secret is “three crucial things — compost, compost, and compost.”

Parishioners now arrive at Vineyard Boise carrying table scraps. They collect lawn clippings, but “only if they didn’t use any chemicals on the lawn,” cautions Meeker. Volunteers turn, turn, turn the compost bins. Companion planting — sugar snap peas with radishes, herbs with tomatoes — is practiced. Bible school classes help with the harvests on Tuesday and Friday nights.

When those in need arrive each Wednesday and Saturday, they start at a tent with a regular food bank—stuff in cans and bags. Then they visit the free medical clinic. And then they stop at what’s informally known as a “benevolent farmers’ market for no-cost produce.” Exchanges aren’t always Sunday-school sweet. “You see a lot of people come in who aren’t very thankful. They want more or not what you have. But they’re God’s children, just like me,” Meeker says. “If you keep that in mind, it’s okay.”

Actually, it’s better than okay. This year the Garden O’ Feedin’ farmers are doubling the land under cultivation. Before long the church will have 5 acres yielding organic fruit and vegetables—and bearing witness not only to its faith, but to the possibilities for all kinds of people to get involved in the fight for a workable future. “We have several people who used to get food here, and now they come volunteer,” says Meeker.

These days, Vineyard Boise is a model of green Christianity. The pastor of the church, Tri Robinson, was an ecology major and a high school biology teacher who lived off the grid in the mountains of California. When he eventually became a pastor and took over the Boise evangelical congregation, he brought many of his old values with him. Thank heaven. “If the statistics are true and Christians do comprise one-third of the world’s population, then what would happen if more than 2 billion people became serious about upholding the value of environmental stewardship?” he asks.

We got some sense of the answer last year when many leading evangelicals signed on to a statement calling for federal action on climate change. It began to change the politics of the issue, to break down its left-right, Republican-Democrat stalemate. In fact, it’s hard to imagine ever managing to build the political momentum for change without the involvement of religious communities around the world. Overcoming vested economic interests will require a moral charge—and our churches and synagogues and mosques are the last institutions we have that can still posit an idea for human existence beyond “He who dies with the most toys wins.”

But that’s an abstraction. Churches offer something else: a physical location, with ground to plant. They can provide a place to start making real the commandment from Genesis to till the earth and the Gospel sanction to feed the hungry. Last year the Garden O’ Feedin’ alone grew 2,200 pounds of cantaloupe—how do you like them apples?

Story by Bill McKibben. Bill McKibben is a scholar in residence at Middlebury College, the author of a dozen books about the environment, and the cofounder of the current 350.org campaign, a global grassroots effort to fight climate change. This article originally appeared in "Plenty" in August 2008.

that's what I'm talking about!

Emergency preparedness

ON MY HEART By Marilyn Moll

Last week I touched on a topic near and dear to my heart, Preparedness during difficult times. Maybe a better word for "preparedness" would be good "old-fashioned" compassion and neighborliness. Here is an excerpt from last week's column:

"...We have been thinking we will all be called to depend on or teach some old-fashioned skills like bartering, gardening, food pantries and neighborliness as the means to survival... I actually believe God may be calling each of us individually, as families, and as the church corporately to address needs in ways the government "stimulus"package will never be able to meet."

Since last week, providentially, our pastor preached on the scriptures that admonish over and over, "What is the greatest commandment? Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, strength, and the second is like it, Love your neighbor as yourself." Who are your neighbors? - the needy.

Pastor Kinser developed the idea of our God being a God of compassion, that loving our neighbor will require a heart of compassion based on needs not worth. Compassion requires something of us, time, money, convenience but demonstrates our love for God when we reach out. The definition of our neighbor includes the needy which encompasses a much broader definition than I had realized. The needy include not only the poor, but the sick, prisoners, lonely, those who don't fit in, outcasts, unpopular, left out, orphans, widows, and the neglected.

What is interesting about the list of needy, is that we have all, most likely, been needy at some point in time, and that most needs do not require money, but time, love, and care. I believe it is time for each of us to prayerfully consider, who are my "neighbors" and how does God want me to reach out? Very possibly food and money may not be their greatest need.

To read the feedback from other readers (from last week) on what they are thinking about preparing for the future, CLICK HERE.

Nevertheless, I do want to be working on my own Family Preparedness Plan (something Duane usually took care of and was passionate about). I still believe I need to make sure I have prepared for the minimum basics which include:

• Water Storage and purification
• Alternative heating and cooking sources
• Food storage
• 72 Hour Kit
• Medical and First Aid Supplies

Be sure to read the details about the new Family Emergency Kit Below.

Introducing - Emergency Preparedness Kit