Harvest With a Heart New Home for Milford Food Bank
Posted
Jordan Fouts-
MILFORD – Harvest with a Heart opened this season with the help of a lot of paint, potting soil and piggy banks.
Hundreds of young students from Wawasee Community Schools and vacation Bible schools got the garden market ready for the first day of its fourth season July 7. Preschoolers planted squash, other students splashed paint on secondhand chairs, and more than 100 members of Milford Chapel VBS brought in buckets of change every day for a week – $500 worth by the end.
“It was the neatest surprise. We’d talked to them and encouraged them to get out in their community and help others,” Nancy Haines, Harvest co-founder, said Thursday. “It’s neat to be a positive influence on our community – we said, you can do this, too.”
Milford Middle School fifth- and sixth-graders chose Harvest as their service project, cleaning out the garden and pulling weeds around the building. Wawasee High School FFA members raised starter plants in the school’s new greenhouse and sold them over Memorial Day weekend to raised money for Harvest.
Other kids helped move the Milford food pantry from the township trustee’s office to its new home, Harvest’s permanent building at South Higbee and West Emeline streets. Open Tuesdays and Fridays from 1 to 3 p.m. in the front of the building, the food pantry will benefit from fresh veggies brought in for the garden market in back Mondays and Thursdays from 3 to 7 p.m.
“That’s for the needy, this is for the community,” Haines said of the two halves of their operation. “We wanted to keep them separate.”
Besides veggies, the food bank is stocked with meat, eggs and cheese. A local business donates eggs, cheese comes from Shipshewana in-laws of another co-founder, Ann Schlabach, and other donations come from Milford churches and organizations.
They keep the food bank stocked “even if we have to go to the store and buy it ourselves,” Schlabach remarked.
Some donors to the food bank, like the town fire department, are returning the kindness from garden market donations. The produce is available for a recommended donation of 25 cents and customers can choose which group to give to, including the library, Kiwanis, Makenna Van Laeken Foundation and, new this year, Lakeland Youth Center.
Schlabach and Haines started Harvest in July 2008 with friend Angel Hardy, wanting to do something with the extra produce from their home gardens. Thousands of pounds of beans, squash, tomatoes and other vegetables come from others around Milford who drop it off or dedicate growing space for Harvest.
Last year, 11,605 pounds of produce netted $3,435 in donations, bringing the three-year totals to 31,560 pounds and $9,213.
Milford Public Library used the money last year to buy books on tape and children’s books, library clerk and Harvest volunteer Sharron Fouts said Thursday.
Most donations are given to Harvest itself.
“We found people are very generous to our jar,” Schlabach said. “It pays for seeds and it pays our bills.”
