A Pennsylvania Pantry Ministry Cleared a Bush to Plant a ‘Garden of Eating,’ and Now It Wants to Help Other Churches Grow One

In front of Common Ground Ministries in Beaver Meadows, Pennsylvania, there used to be a bush. This year it came out, and six garden beds went in. By fall, Pastor Everett Upton was reaching through thick green foliage to pick tomatoes, turnips, peppers and eggplants that would be handed to neighbors for free.

The ministry calls it the Garden of Eating. It is a small plot by any measure, but WVIA News, the public broadcaster for northeastern Pennsylvania, reported on Oct. 24 that in its first year it has already produced hundreds of pounds of produce for the roughly 800 families the nonprofit serves. For a food pantry that mostly hands out packaged and rescued groceries, that is a real change in what ends up on the table.

“Getting fresh vegetables and fruits and stuff like that is very rare,” Upton told WVIA. “And so, in trying to problem solve, what we’ve decided to do is grow our own.”

A pantry with a simple motto

Common Ground Ministries is a nondenominational Christian organization with a three-word motto: “Everybody Eats.” Upton and his wife, Sherry, founded it in 2004 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and moved the work to northeastern Pennsylvania in 2007. Today it serves families in Luzerne, Carbon and Monroe counties.

Their work with hungry neighbors is older than the ministry. According to Common Ground’s website, Sherry Upton began sharing food from her culinary school classes with homeless people near New York’s Port Authority Bus Terminal in 1986, and in 1992 the couple opened a soup kitchen in Newark called We Can Help.

The ministry says it was forced to relocate four times over two decades. That ended in 2023, when it bought a former church in Beaver Meadows. WVIA reported that the building, the former St. Mary’s Church on Route 93, was purchased with $500,000 in American Rescue Plan Act funds, and that having a permanent home lets the pantry respond to food emergencies at any hour. It also gave the ministry something it had never had before: its own land to plant.

From starter plants to six beds

For several years, Common Ground gave families free starter vegetable plants so they could grow food at home. The ministry’s website says it has handed out more than a thousand of them. Planting a garden of its own was the next step, and WVIA reported that it has saved the pantry money while giving families a wider variety of fruit and vegetables at a time when local demand for food has risen.

Today the six beds hold a mix that reads like a seed catalog: tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers, turnips, carrots, beets, kale, lettuce, squash, eggplant, berries, herbs and even bok choy. Apple, pear and peach trees have been planted too. Local businesses donated some starter plants, and other partners have chipped in money.

Upton gave much of the credit for getting started to David Hartung, a teacher and community garden volunteer who grew up on a farm in Millville and later studied agricultural techniques. Hartung told WVIA he suggested the garden after hearing that the donations reaching Upton were shrinking each year. He contributed money, soil and know-how.

“Food security, I think, should be a top priority for communities,” Hartung said. “So we started the garden, and it’s just been a huge success.”

Food for people the pantry shelves can’t serve

One of the garden’s quieter benefits is who it helps. Some of the families Common Ground serves have special dietary needs and cannot eat much of the packaged food a pantry typically receives. Fresh vegetables and herbs fill that gap.

“The fresh garden is perfect for them,” Upton said. “We give them those herbs and the fresh stuff, a prayer, and they keep it moving. We’ve had a lot of success stories.”

The garden also connects to the ministry’s other big effort, rescuing food that would otherwise be thrown away. Common Ground buys or collects grocery food nearing its sell-by date and distributes it within a day. The ministry says it recovers more than 100,000 pounds a year, and that whatever people cannot eat goes to farm animals or becomes compost for the Garden of Eating. In 2026 it received a $50,000 Food Recovery Infrastructure Grant from the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection, which paid for a dedicated van for recovery pickups.

Gardeners will recognize the loop: tired grocery-store lettuce becomes compost, the compost feeds the beds, and the beds grow next month’s lettuce for the same families.

Lessons that grow slowly

Upton says he is still learning. He told WVIA that Sherry is the one with the green thumb. The youth group helps in the garden, and he sees the work as a kind of teaching that fits naturally with ministry.

“It teaches them patience,” he said. Young volunteers plant seeds, wait weeks for a sprout and then wait even longer for the plants to bear fruit. “These are all lessons that, from a ministerial perspective, you can teach.”

The ministry stretches the old proverb a step further: feed a person a fish, teach them to fish, then train them to train others, until the helped become the helpers. Groceries meet the need of the day. The skills young volunteers pick up in the garden, from planting and composting to preparing food, are meant to last longer.

Hartung told WVIA he sees a garden as one of the best classrooms there is, because it mixes subjects, rewards different strengths and teaches people to work together.

The garden is not only for the young. Upton said older volunteers often bring a lifetime of gardening knowledge, and the beds give them a way to pass it on. He also sees a benefit for anyone who spends a morning there. “It’s kind of hard to be in a garden and be stressed because you’re dealing with nature,” he said. “We’re getting vitamin D. We’re getting fresh air. We’re moving around … It’s a win-win for everybody.”

An open invitation to other congregations

Part of the reason for planting the garden was to make it a model. On its website, Common Ground invites churches across northeastern Pennsylvania to plant community gardens of their own and offers to help, whether a congregation has a corner of lawn or an empty lot.

“What they could do is contact us, and we’d show them exactly what we did and whatever we could do to help them get started,” Upton told WVIA. “I would just encourage people to give it a shot.”

Hartung is making a similar offer. He told WVIA he has 50 fruit trees available to donate to churches and nonprofits, with free installation over the next few weeks or in the spring, and that he hopes to expand community garden access in Wilkes-Barre. He can be reached on Instagram at @churchgardens. “Most people, no matter how much space they have in their community, can grow fertile gardens … with little difficulty,” he said, adding that start-up costs are low.

That message travels well beyond Carbon County. Here in the low desert, fall is the main planting season, and a church with a strip of unused ground and a hose bib can start small with lettuce, kale, carrots, beets and herbs, many of the same crops growing in Beaver Meadows. The harder part is rarely the soil. It is finding a few people willing to show up every week and a pantry ready to take what they grow.

How the ministry serves, and how to help

Common Ground’s pantry runs most days of the week from its Beaver Meadows center, with hours that vary. Curbside pickup is the main way families get groceries, and the ministry delivers to people who truly cannot get there. It also holds a monthly drive-through distribution in Monroe County. WVIA reported that proof of income is not required and that services are open to people of every faith and background.

Volunteers can pack boxes, drive deliveries, pick up rescued food, mentor young people, or plant, weed and harvest in the Garden of Eating. The ministry also runs Bible studies, youth programs and free monthly community events, and it is developing a Christian day care and after-school program called Let’s Grow.

To ask about food pickups, volunteering or starting a garden, call or text Common Ground Ministries at 570-801-2699, email hungryletseatcgm@gmail.com, or visit commongroundministriespa.org. The ministry’s center is at 121-B Berwick St. in Beaver Meadows.

Six beds will not end hunger in three counties, and nobody at Common Ground claims they will. But a bush came out, seeds went in, and this fall families who rarely see fresh food went home with tomatoes, herbs and a prayer. The ministry’s hope now is that the next garden like it gets planted somewhere else.