All Peoples Gathering Harvest Hands

06/09/2026

05/28/2026

HELP! We had catastrophic freeze damage on the west rain tote plumbing. So we are down 500 gallons of storage. Do you know anyone who might have a minute to replace it? Contact the church office (414)264-1616. We depend on these totes for the reclaimed water.

05/21/2026

Didn't get to Grow Day last weekend? There is another opportunity THIS Saturday (5/23) from 10am-2pm to come and plant in the garden and other work.

05/17/2026

05/17/2026

Thank you to all the helpers that came out for Grow Day yesterday. There will be a time after church today to be in the garden as well (weather depending).

05/11/2026

Looking for headboards to go around our garden area, metal preferred but we will also take the wood ones.

Send a message to learn more

05/09/2026

Don't forget to sign up for Grow Day next weekend! Gardening skills not required. Come and help our garden grow. We will have a DJ on Saturday and Pastor Evan is going to grill.

04/21/2026

Partner churches, groups, families, individuals sign up to help during Grow Weekend!! Email Rae if you are interested in volunteering. (formerly known as Spring Work Weekend)

03/26/2026

Every raised bed starts rich and gets poorer. Every season you harvest nutrients out of the soil and replace them with bags from the store. A keyhole garden reverses that equation by composting directly into the bed while plants are growing.

The design is a circular raised bed about six feet across with a wedge-shaped opening on one side — the keyhole — that lets you reach a wire compost basket anchored in the center. Kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, eggshells, and yard waste go into the basket throughout the season. Water poured over the scraps carries nutrients outward through the soil as a slow-release compost tea that reaches every root in the bed. The soil slopes gently downward from the center basket to the outer walls so gravity does the distribution work.

Underneath the planting surface, the bed is built in layers — cardboard on the bottom, then coarse branches for drainage, then alternating browns and greens topped with quality soil. The compost basket ties the whole system together. Instead of building fertility once and watching it drain away, you are feeding the bed continuously with waste that would otherwise go in the trash.

🌱 How to build a keyhole garden:
1. Mark a six-foot circle in a sunny spot and build walls two to three feet high from stone, brick, or stacked wood — leave a two-foot wedge open on one side for the keyhole access path
2. Set a wire mesh compost basket in the center, about eighteen inches in diameter, extending one foot above the finished wall height. Chicken wire or hardware cloth works — line the outside with burlap so fine scraps stay contained
3. Lay cardboard across the full floor inside the walls to suppress grass and attract earthworms as it decomposes
4. Fill the bottom six inches with coarse branches, broken pots, or stones for drainage. This prevents the lower layers from sitting in water after heavy rain
5. Layer alternating browns and greens — shredded cardboard, straw, aged manure, leaf litter — until you reach about four inches from the top of the walls. Slope everything slightly downward from the basket toward the outer edges
6. Finish with four to six inches of topsoil-compost blend for planting. Mulch around transplants and water through the compost basket so nutrients flow outward from the first day

Toss scraps into the basket after every meal. What fed you yesterday feeds your garden tomorrow. The bed never asks for a bag of fertilizer because the kitchen keeps delivering.

The scraps that used to fill your trash can now fill your harvest basket 🌿

02/05/2026

Spring is coming soon!!! Starting March 16th we will start to be in the Grow Room planting 6000 seeds for our garden, satellite gardens, and our neighbors who want to learn how to garden. Contact the office if you would like to help us. It takes a village to grow a garden!!