The call came out of nowhere.
Chris Stutzman runs a garden supply store, Garden Harvest Supply, in a small town in Indiana. He was looking to donate some plants to community gardens across the country when his father learned about Manna Meal's garden in South Charleston.
He called up Jean Simpson, Manna Meal's executive director, and asked, "How many plants do you want and when can we deliver them?"
Garden Harvest Supply donated about 3,500 vegetable plants to the garden Saturday afternoon. Simpson said the donation will allow the garden to get ahead for the season and enable the kitchen to provide more organic fresh food than ever before.
"We've not been able to produce enough food, not at all," Simpson said. "Every year we do a little bit better and a little bit better. This year is going to surpass everything by triple or more. It's exciting."
Now, Simpson just needs to find enough volunteers to harvest and bundle the crops from all the new spinach, kale, Swiss Chard, tomato and pepper plants.
The Stutzman family's business started up about nine years ago. At the outset, it was a one-stop shop for a gardener. It sold everything a person needs to start and run a garden - from seeds and plants to the tools to harvest them.
Over time, the focus of the business shifted to supplying plants. People from all 50 states buy the Stutzmans' plants - their biggest orders, though, come from states like California, Texas and New York.
This year, the Stutzmans decided to give back.
"We decided to reach out to community gardens across the country and just donate to them," Stutzman said. "It's the communities that buy from us, so we wanted to give back to them a little bit."
When all is done, they will have donated to 10 gardens across the country. Stutzman has spent the last several days driving his car up and down the East Coast delivering the plants, and his father made deliveries along the West Coast.
"We just thought, 'What are we doing as a company to give back?' " Stutzman said. "We hadn't done really anything as a company. As cliche as it sounds, we really just did want to give back because it's the right thing to do."
The big reason the Stutzmans chose Manna Meal's community garden is because of what happens to the food after it's harvested. Volunteers from all over the Kanawha Valley donate time each week to tend the garden, which is tucked behind the Rock Lake Presbyterian Church Community Center in South Charleston.
That food will go on to be prepared at Manna Meal's kitchen at St. John's Episcopal Church in Charleston. The kitchen, which survives off of donations and grants alone, serves breakfast and lunch to anyone in need. For the eight years the garden has been around, there haven't been quite enough volunteers to grow enough food to fully support the kitchen.
"With these plants, we're going to end up with a lot more food sooner," Simpson said.
Reach Jake Jarvis at jake.jarvis@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-7939, Facebook.com/newsroomjake or follow @NewsroomJake on Twitter.