Thank you for a great season!

We’ve done it again! Thanks to everyone who volunteered, supported and cheered this effort on. In 2017, 1,600 pounds of fresh, nutritious produce grown in the Interfaith Garden was donated to the Lexington Food Pantry, bringing the 8-year total to 12,100 pounds. And it couldn’t have been done without an interfaith and community effort.

It was a good season! 46 varieties of vegetables, fruit and herbs made its way to the Pantry. Interested in knowing the top crops? Here are the 5 highest yielding crops:

Total pounds
Tomatoes 304.6
Squash 144.6
Onions 115.3
Bok Choy 107.9
Butternut Squash 105.0

 

The final day at the Garden was Sat, Oct 28th. The last delivery included tomatoes, broccoli, lettuce, cabbage, eggplant, peppers, chard and various herbs.

For a complete report see here, and for all the reports from this season, click here.

Thank you again…and see you in 2018!!

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Garden Report – August 26th

We had another great day at the garden on Saturday with about 11 or 12 folks working today. We had a couple new folks, but mostly “regulars” volunteering. Absolutely perfect weather, blue skies, crisp air.

We had an astonishing 94 pounds of tomatoes go over to pantry today – and after the carts left someone noticed we hadn’t picked any cherry tomatoes. We also had amazing amounts of basil and parsley and they smelled so heavenly. I’m getting hungry just thinking about it.
Tomatoes are now far and away our number one item at 192 pounds for the year. There are still a lot of green tomatoes left to harvest as well. Onions and squash are each about 110 pounds, then spaghetti squash, cucumbers, rhubarb, and potatoes come in around 40 pounds each so far this year.

We are now over 900 pounds for the year.

There was a bunch of squash (it is shaped like butternut, but colored differently) harvested on Tuesday. We also took two good sized eggplants over. They were beautiful.

One downside of Carla being gone for two weeks is that mosst of our pallets / plastic trays were still over at the food pantry. We shuffled things around and made it work.

The carts came back with a big pile of plastic trays and one of the wire buckets that went over last week.

Speaking of carts going to the pantry – last week the small cart came back with a flat. We pumped it up last week and it seemed to be holding – but today that tire was flat again. So we’ll have to get the tire patch kit out next week.

It has been dry here – so we did water as much of the leafy greens as we could.

Next weekend is Labor Day weekend. The Interfaith garden and the food pantry will be closed for the holiday.  We will see you all in a couple weeks!

 

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Love What Matters

“20 or so years ago my friend Iva’s grandmother lost her diamond engagement ring while farming/gardening on her family’s land near Armena (Camrose), Alberta, Canada. After many tears and hours of searching, she never did find the ring. In the end, she used her own hard earned money to replace the ring and never told her Husband!

Iva recently built a house on a portion of this family farm land. This garden has been feeding the family for years, but this year it had a special gift for them.

Guess what happened when Iva’s family went to harvest some of the garden last night?!? 😳

Grandma’s secrets are safe with mother earth no more!

The “carrot ring” has been returned to Iva’s Grandma as of this morning (Aug 15, 2017) she is very happy to have the original ring her late husband proposed to her with.”

Hat tip to Kathryn Jacob!

[Love What Matters]

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Garden Report – August 19th

It was a beautiful day to be working at the garden this morning. Perfect temperatures, blue sky with a few clouds, low humidity and a good amount of dew still on the grass as we arrived.

Carla is on vacation visiting grandkids this week, but we had a great crew today of about 16 very experienced volunteers from Grace Chapel, Hancock Church and the Chinese Bible Chapel. We also had a first time student who was working to earn some of his community service hours.

We had our largest delivery to the food pantry so far this year of about 169 pounds of produce (with a lot of thanks to the crew of volunteers from Tuesday). Even with our largest harvest so far this year – we sent three full food carts off to the pantry early!

Three carts with 169 pounds of produce!

The star of the show today was 56 pounds of a wide variety of regular and heirloom tomatoes. We also delivered 21 pounds of yellow squash, 19 pounds of cucumbers, 18 pounds of onions, and 15 pounds of spaghetti squash. We also had about 8 pounds each of rhubarb and green peppers and 6 pounds each of beans and zucchini.

So far this year, we are close to 750 pounds of produce delivered to the pantry. Surprisingly the number one item is onions at about 115 pounds so far this year. Tomatoes are number 2 at 98 pounds and yellow squash at 86 pounds. After that, we have 43 pounds of spaghetti squash, 40 pounds of potatoes, 37 pounds of rhubarb, 34 pounds of bok choy, 28 pounds of zucchini, 27 pounds of cucumbers, 26 pounds of parslane and green peppers, 18 pounds of Swiss chard and radishes, followed by 13 pounds of leeks, basil and lettuce.

 

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From Garden to Food Pantry: June 17, 2017

Harvesting at the Garden

Carting the harvest to the food pantry

Donnalee, who often volunteers at the Garden on Tuesday afternoons was was waiting for our delivery at the Food Pantry.

 

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