Bounty for the needy

Agency, volunteers harvest veggies left in fields

Grace Beahm
The Post and Courier

Volunteers Virginia Chaplin and Martin Shorter pick the remaining tomatoes at Boone Hall farms for Fields to Families, a program that distributes surplus fresh produce from local farmers to needy lowcountry families.

MOUNT PLEASANT — About $350 worth of tomatoes were headed for families who couldn't otherwise afford them.

Not bad for less than an hour's work.

A group of hot and dirty amateurs stood in a field at Boone Hall Plantation on a sunny Friday afternoon. For most of them, it was their first time picking tomatoes.

Deacon Mel Whack, who had done it before, weighed the full boxes in the back of his pickup truck and announced the total — 328 pounds. They would go to Trinity Missionary Baptist Church in Goose Creek, where they would help feed dozens of needy families. Another box that Whack didn't weigh would go to another agency.

"It's really a blessing," Whack said. "A lot of these older people would never get fresh vegetables."

Boone Hall tomatoes usually sell for $1 a pound. These were free for the cause because they were leftovers. They weren't ripe yet when the pickers came through. Any that weren't picked by Monday would be turned under with the dirt to prepare for the next planting.

That aspect of farming has always bothered Jacki Baer, who coordinated Friday's effort. She used to work with Lowcountry Plant-A-Row and now directs an agency called Fields to Families. She finds leftover crops, volunteers to pick them, and agencies to deliver them to needy families.

"It just killed me to think this produce would be turned under," said Baer, who is also a Charleston County Clemson Extension Service Master Gardener. "There is such a need out there."

Fields to Families has collected more than 20,000 pounds of fresh vegetables that would have been wasted since January, she said. She gets them from commercial farmers and vendors, farmers markets in Charleston, North Charleston, Mount Pleasant and Summerville, and home gardens.

"I think it's great that all this is going to people who can really use it," said Erin Boudolf, one of the pickers at Boone Hall Friday.

Eight adults and two children turned out Friday. They were hot but happy.

"It's a great dirty," said Martin Shorter, a professional golfer. "It really is."

Shorter was helping his wife, Kate Shorter, who directs The Cooper School in West Ashley. All the volunteers Friday except Whack and Boudolf were with the school.

Reach Dave Munday at 745-5862 or dmunday@post andcourier.com.