Dallas church garden’s abundance makes a big impact on its food-insecure community
For 21 years, garden manager Becky Smith and dozens of volunteers have helped Our Saviour Community Garden in Dallas, Texas, produce more than 120,000 pounds of produce to feed hungry people. Photo: Our Saviour Community Garden
[Episcopal News Service] Since 2003, Our Saviour Community Garden, located on the grounds of the Church of Our Saviour in Dallas, Texas, has been providing fresh fruits and vegetables to help feed people in need.
Becky Smith has overseen the 1-acre garden since its founding. In those 21 years, she and dozens of volunteers have cultivated more than 60 tons of food – 120,000 pounds – all grown organically and donated to the Pleasant Grove Food Pantry. The pantry serves an area of southeast Dallas where 25% of children are at risk for hunger.
“It’s using space for what’s going to work best to feed people,” Smith told Episcopal News Service.
Food from the garden makes a big difference to clients of the food pantry, Martha Doleshal, its executive director, told ENS. Up to a third of the pantry’s fruits and vegetables come from Our Saviour, she said.
“The vegetables are very popular,” Doleshal said. Leafy greens like turnip and collard greens are a special favorite of their older clients. “They enjoy the fruits and vegetables they grew up with … and they know how to cook them.”
The pantry serves 400 families a week from different cultural backgrounds, and to help them learn how to prepare vegetables new to them, Smith provides recipe cards, Doleshal said. That includes items that may be new to people, like eggplant, Austrian winter peas and amaranth, an ancient grain.
Individuals and families may also tend their own garden plots on the same 1 acre cultivated by Smith and the gardens volunteers.
Fruit trees grow across the church’s total 4 acres – old pecan trees that are in front of the church mostly feed the squirrels that get there first, Smith said – along with plum, pear and fig trees whose fruit goes to the pantry.
Pumpkin vines along the fences got their start in the pumpkin patch at St. James’ in Dallas. Since 2022 St. James’ has delivered its unsold pumpkins to the garden after Halloween. That first year they put as many as they could into the compost bin but still had pumpkins left, Smith said, so she suggested placing them by the fence.
A mother and son from the Dallas Young Men’s Service League plant seeds in the garden. Photo: Our Saviour Community Garden
Over the winter they decomposed and dropped their seeds, which sprouted in the spring and brought forth new pumpkins. Again this summer, mature gourds from those vines were given to the food pantry.
When asked, Smith couldn’t say how many varieties of fruits and vegetables the garden produces but guessed it to be in the hundreds. Dozens of varieties of heirloom tomatoes are among them, chosen because they have hardy genes well-adapted to hot, dry Dallas summers like this year, when not a drop of rain fell for three months, she said.
The garden has access to city water, but it’s expensive, she said, so irrigation water mostly relies on a cistern that collects up to 4 inches of rainwater when it does fall. Volunteers use drip tape to add moisture and mulch to hold it in the ground.
This summer the garden did use some city water to keep some younger fruit trees alive, but everything else had to survive, or not, without it.
The garden does not receive support from the church – Smith said it doesn’t have an actual budget – but it does bring in money from its annual March plant sale. She and volunteers save seeds from year to year, where they get their start in the garden’s greenhouse until they are repotted into individual containers for sale. It also receives money or donated items, including fruit trees a few years ago from The Giving Grove, which helps to create small orchards in urban areas to produce food for hungry people.
A designated Jubilee Ministry of The Episcopal Church, the garden received Jubilee grants in 2012 and 2018.
It also is part The Episcopal Church’s Good News Gardens and has been featured in Brian Sellers Petersen’s book, “Harvesting Abundance.” He told ENS by email that Our Saviour Community Garden “is one of the best examples of church land stewardship that in turn supports the community in countless ways.”
Smith keeps the garden thriving with the help of a dozen regular helpers, including two families that care for the flock of 10 hens, folks she calls her “chicken tenders.” Special needs students in Dallas Independent School District high schools help out every week. Regular volunteers include students from other area high schools and colleges, as well as from other groups.
Smith said she believes that every person who comes to the garden – to help produce food or in need of it – is there for a reason. “I hope they take away something from that,” she said. “It’s just such a blessing to be where I can share what God gives us.”
— Melodie Woerman is an Episcopal News Service freelance reporter based in Kansas.
