The Silver City Gospel Mission is looking for someone to take charge and supervise its garden for this next year.

This is a volunteer position, but it does have numerous benefits, including:

Excess produce for your home table
Labor to help you with the garden
Supplies, compost, seeds and water to run it
And last, but not least, the satisfaction of helping to feed those who are hungry!
In the back of the Mission we have had a very productive garden on some years and a so-so one on others, and it all depends on the help we have available to run it.

We can't afford to hire another staff member to do it, so this past year the duties fell between the maintenance/food pick-up person and myself and it eventually became my responsibility entirely and to be honest, things kind of went to heck.

We have also tried using volunteer labor from those who show up for a while and then are gone and the ladies staying at our women's shelter. But we have also run into problems when they leave or get full-time employment and once again, if the garden doesn't get maintained on nearly a daily basis by someone who knows what they are doing, it just doesn't work out.

This year we are looking for someone to step up and take charge and come in for an hour or two just about every day.

It will be entirely your show and pretty much anything goes (within reason).

We have a large 54GǦ x 36GǦ area with drip hose and timers for planting, with about half of it with well-worked and composted soil.

We have a large greenhouse for seedlings or tomatoes, etc. and a sunroom off the back of the Mission that we have used as an herb garden, but has plenty of room for more.

And we still have the basics of a recirculating hydroponics system where we grew micro-greens that the ladies at our women's shelter sold at the Farmer's Market.

We would like someone who knows (or is willing to learn) about gardening in our Southwest and can plant, maintain and harvest a large area with help from the volunteers we get at the Mission daily.

We use the produce in the soup kitchen, but anything that we don't use, you will be free to take and there is always a huge surplus after the soup kitchen gets theirs that we normally hand out if things are going well.

So if you have always wanted the space to garden and have everything you need to get and keep going except the ideas, please come down to the Mission and talk to Randy.

The Silver City Gospel Mission is located at 111 S. Texas Street in Downtown Silver City, behind Jalisco's Restaurant and is open Mon-Fri between 8:30 am and 1:30 pm. 575-388-5071.