Annual Rake Off & Chili Lunch!

After services this Sunday we will:

1)Decorate the Church for Advent & Christmas!
2) Haul piles of leaves back to the Church Garden!
3) Eat Chili and have a good time!

The work should take less than an hour. Men, please bring your favorite Chili concoction, a rake, and a tarp. We want YOU to have a good time!

See you Sunday!

Produce: Go For It!

Hyacinth Bean Pod

There are green beans, sweet potatoes, a few ripe tomatoes, a lot of green tomatoes, watermelon, and some peppers in the Community Garden. Stop by and pick what you need.

Folks from the neighborhood have been invited to pick out of the garden (two families have taken us up on it), and kids who live around the church have done a good job of finding the watermelons (we're glad they did), but there are a few left. As Shakespeare wrote, "the race is to the swift."

For salsa fans there are plenty of Rutgers (sorry, Hogs fans) variety tomatoes available for salsa verde, for frying, or for that infamous green tomato pie that is really good. You may also find some eggplants. Again, help yourself.

The picture above is of a hyacinth bean pod. Feel free to pick these for inclusion in salads or Asian soups. Do not eat the dry beans but by all means collect the pods for replanting in your own gardens next Spring.

Our Fall clean-up is going well. We're about a day or two away from finishing up our work in the Community Garden and then, we'll move on to the Children's Garden. By Thanksgiving at the latest both gardens will look spectacular and be ready to rest over the winter.

If anyone has some composted chicken manure we will be very grateful to get it. Thanks to everyone for your terrific support of our Creation Care mission!

Outreach and Communications!

Drawing of Alexander Bell's first telephone

We're very excited about expanding our church's outreach efforts to bring as many people as we can to Christ. Some of these efforts will include updating our website, developing protocols for Facebook and Twitter, and consolidation of our various e-mailing lists into LISTServ formats.

When our Wednesday Night Contemporary service is fully back on the weekly schedule, we will promote it by placing videos of the services on YouTube, and showcasing the talents of our young people and visiting guest artists and preachers. We think these efforts, including podcast capabilities, will really enhance the visibility of and vitality of our programming for youth and their parents.

Although our initial focus is on electronic communication, we will also review, edit, and enhance our print communication, like brochures, etc. so that we have attractive and informative information to hand out to visitors and at civic events or fraternal organizations.

Included in our efforts will be acting on plans for a new church sign, and developing a strategy to consistently access free local media.

As Disciples, we have an exciting and deeply meaningful church experience to offer Berryville and the surrounding communities. If you would like to help shape and develop our new outreach and communication efforts, please stop by and talk with Pastor French about your ideas!

Preparing for Fall

A large pile of mulch ready for transfer to the garden's pathways.

The Community Garden is being prepared for fall. Basically, this involves three tasks: 1) weeding and cleaning rocks from beds; 2) Applying a deep application of mulch for water and weed containment, and; 3) planting a fall cover crop like oats or vetch. Be sure to stop by and check out our progress.

We have the Community Garden about 1/3 mulched and about 3/4 weeded. It is starting to look pretty good. The mulch pile pictured above has disappeared, and as soon as another pile shows up we'll continue. Once the Community garden is fully mulched and weeded we'll move on to the Little Sprouts' Garden.

Cardboard makes an excellent base for garden bed foundations.

Thank you, everyone, who donated their cardboard boxes to the garden. If you have more, bring them over to the church and just toss them over the fence. We'll take them from there.

Working in the garden is a real blessing and helps our gardeners structure their days along a commonly recommended Christian way of structuring a Christian lifestyle: reading and studying holy books, prayer and meditation and, manual labor. We are grateful that fellow Disciples have given us this wonderful opportunity.

Thank you, Lord, for the Delicious Rain!

Just when we decided to pull the plug on watering our church garden the Lord provided a good, strong, and life-giving rain during the night. How thankful we can be!

And, what a delicious outcome. Because of high night time temperatures and no rainfall plant blossoms were unable to set fruit, and what fruit we got was puny, squishy, and not very nice. But look at the ugly babies in the picture above (picked earlier in the year)and imagine them in the cooking pot or on our salads! Last night's rain will give us at least a couple more weeks harvest.

Yes, it has been a good year for tomatoes. We've supplied tomatoes for the Senior Center, invited the neighborhood in (they have taken up our offers to pick freely), and even had a few left over to provide on Sunday morning and once in a while at Loaves and Fishes. We feel blessed.

We also feel inspired to get going with our fall planting. It is going to be terrific and we're optimistic about supplying everyone with sweet potatoes for our Thanksgiving dinners. God is Good all the time!

Down...but not out!

It is time for us to stop watering the garden. There is no way that we can sensibly keep ahead of the drought. what happens next is tearing out many of the plants--like the tomatoes--and then some diligent weeding. This will occur over the next several weeks.

In the mean time we do need to start watering the trees and shrubs around the church yard; they are in tough shape and in danger of dying after two plus years of dry weather. If we get some sufficient rain in the next few weeks we'll start putting in some fall plants. Anyway, if you want some green tomatoes now is the time to get them.

Red Tomato Blues

We've had fun experimenting in the garden this year. In many ways, the garden has been a learning center, particularly with our tomatoes. We started out with six varieties of heirloom tomato seeds which we grew in the Hale's greenhouse. Three grew well from the seeds started there; one variety did okay and two of them didn't do well at all. They pretty much died in the pot (ungrateful seeds!).

The three healthy starts did well in the garden and we've had a good crop. What we've learned, however, is that heirloom varieties are not resistant to insects (in fact, they attract them)and they are not particularly heat tolerant. Since we planted early and before it got so hot the plants flowered well and set fruit pretty well. Now, however, the nights have also been hot and the flowers are failing to set.

A big question for us to answer is if we want to continue with heirloom varieties next year or, to go with more commonly known plants that are both heat and insect resistant. The heirlooms are interesting to look at, and the taste is often superior, but it is discouraging to have so many "bad" fruits among the good, and they are a lot more work.

It has also been a terrible year for squash and zucchini. We also used heirloom seeds to start these plants and they never did a thing. Since long range weather forecasters predict several more years of heat and drought, we certainly going to go with non-heirloom plants in this family next year.

All that aside, we are still producing many more tomatoes than we probably need. This week, we donated about a bushel to Loaves and Fishes and we've been experimenting (successfully) with green tomato pie. Stayed tuned for the recipe.

Be sure to stop by the garden and pick some tomatoes. There are plenty. And, as always, your Community Gardeners are grateful and thankful for our church's generosity and support of our efforts. Thank you, thank you!