We're asking for gardeners in our area to help feed the hungry in one simple way: Plant a little extra in your garden this spring, and when harvest time comes around we'll put together a collection spot and bring the food to Food Gatherers in Ann Arbor.
This blog will hopefully serve as a motivator, guide and recording spot, where we'll note how many pounds of fresh food we've helped donate to Food Gatherers each week.
I've always wanted to do the Big House/Big Heart 5K run in early October (OK, not always, since the thing has only been around for three years ... I should say I've wanted to do it the last two times, and couldn't for whatever reason.)
This year, I might make time to get out there and run. I was just perusing through the site and guess what? Project Grow is one of the charities that will benefit from the run!
See the list of charities receiving donations here.
I've had this idea bouncing around in my head about what to do about the fact that many poorer people in urban areas like Detroit don't have access to fresh fruits and vegetables. Detroit's not a city like New York, where there are gorgeous bodegas on every corner with flowers and fruit stacked up outside luring customers in.
So I was thinking, what if you could do something like a lunch truck that drove around to different neighborhoods, bringing these things to people? So instead of frying up an unhealthy lunch, you could serve up street food with a healthy twist, and sell whole veggies/fruits on the side. Also would be great if the place was set up to take food stamps ...
Anyway, the idea is still just an idea, but there's some folks out in Brooklyn who are also onto the idea of the mobile veggies. They filled up an old Dodge (sorry, Ford truck fans) and loaded it up with waterproofing material, lightweight synthetic soil, and real soil. Check out this cool video here: (You can also see their website here. Apologies in advance for the bad folksy music.)
So, my garden is quickly coming to an end. It hasn't been a great year for this garden, but I learned a few key lessons. All of them learned the hard way.
1. Cilantro self-seeds. If you don't want the garden to be infested with cilantro next summer, make sure you pick it all before it goes to see and takes over your soil. But they sure do smell good when you're pulling them out.
2. There is a reason why you should thin the carrot seedlings. Once they start growing, they get big. And envelope each other. And come out in all sorts of funky shapes and sizes.
3. Watering regularly keeps everything from dying. I know, this one is a no brainer. But I forgot. For a while. And my lovely peapods, which were doing quite well, all died.
4. If you can't remember to water things, container gardening is not for you. Everything will die and shrivel up.
5. Pea plants are big, and will overshadow anything growing behind them. There is not enough room in my garden for pea plants and tomatoes.
6. It is more satisfying to pull a vegetable out of the dirt than to pick it off a stem. Not sure why this is, but clearly the kids and I both enjoyed pulling up radishes and carrots more than anything else.
7. I really miss having a good crop of cherry tomatoes. They will be a priority next year.
8. Zucchini and cucumbers take up too much room for my tiny garden.
9. When you tell the kids they can help pull out weeds, you need to watch them closely, or else they will joyfully pull out every living plant in the garden.
10. Those of us with blackish thumbs should probably simplify. Already planning next year's garden: Carrots, cherry tomatoes, and sugar snap peas. And that's it. Plus, I will set up electronic reminders to water the garden ...
Collection update:
We are up to almost 130 pounds of produce collected and dropped off to Food Gatherers! Such great news! And we're always looking for more ...
There's a nice article on annarborchronicle.com about Alex Young, manager of Zingerman's Roadhouse, and his efforts at farming. My lovely husband pointed it out to me yesterday morning, noting that I should go volunteer for him and learn something about gardening.
His point is well taken. I love the idea of gardening, and I love planting, but I lose my will somewhere in the early summer when the plants are still just little plants and there's nothing to harvest. I forget about it, and forget to water, and then the garden becomes a mess. That's the state my tiny garden is in right now: A complete mess. The green beans were doing well, but then they dried out and died before I harvested even one. My tomato plants were crowded out by the larger bean plants, and are now struggling to hang on. The only thing doing well right now is the carrots. We will probably harvest them next week.
We brought another 40 pounds of veggies to Food Gatherers today. Whoot! My 6 year old son, James, likes to come along for the ride. He loves the big stone carrots outside of the Food Gatherers building, and I love the company. Most times he's very quiet in the car, although I try getting him to talk. But he's with me, so that's gotta be something.
On Sunday, Sept. 20th, Growing Hope will hold its annual fundraiser: A 3-hour dinner by local chefs at the site of the future Growing Hope Center in Ypsilanti. Tickets are $75 for one person, $100 for two, or $10 off if you book by Sept. 4.
I am hoping to attend, although funds are tight. I may volunteer my time instead, setting up the day before. Hope to see some of you there!
I'm not even going to count up the months it's been since my last post (you can do the math if you so wish ...) I could say I got busy, or got kidnapped by aliens, or involved in a national tabloid magazine scandal of some sort, but the truth is, I got a little busy and lost a lot of initiative for this project.
But I got a swift kick in the behind a few weeks ago from a dear friend, and now I am proud to say that we have already collected 51 pounds of food and delivered it to Food Gatherers! Amazing! That's the draw in just two weeks, with contributions from St. Joseph Church in Dexter and some neighbors in Huron Farms.
We need/want more! Food Gatherers has seen a 50% increase in demand for its services, so anything we can get there will be helpful. I can make daily runs to the dropoff point, and am willing to take whatever we can get. Food Gatherers has taken zucchini without any complaints, so if that's what you've got, please pass it along.
We're having a growing season kick-off event next Saturday, May 16th, at Foggy Bottom coffeehouse from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. Swing by to sign a pledge form (it's free, no money expected), grab a Plant-A-Row-For-The-Hungry garden marker, or pick up a packet of seeds.
I'll be on hand to talk about how you can get this started with your own community group, or to talk about any gardening issues you might have. Or just to say hi!
More posts coming this week, including one on what to grow if you've got a deer issue and another on the upsides of growing in a planter.
Today is Mother's Day -- my kiddos got me a lovely Thai Basil plant and a purple pepper plant. Just need to find a spot to put them. My planter in the back yard is full of carrots, cilantro, lettuce, snow peas, tomatoes and cucumber plants. I put a tomato plant in a pot out front, as well as some more cilantro and cherry tomatoes. Think I'll need two more pots for the Thai Basil and the purple pepper ...
Have a lovely day, and hope you're enjoying this lovely Michigan weather!
Foggy Bottom coffee house in the Country Market shopping plaza
(photo credit: treetowntalk.com)
Foggy Bottom has agreed to be a drop-off point for the Plant A Row for the Hungry efforts. Yay! Thanks to owner Doug Marrin for agreeing so quickly. It'll be a great place for dropoffs because it's air conditioned (better than having the dropoff spot be my front porch or yard) and lots of people go there or by there during the week anyway. And Doug is always friendly and up for a chat (he's got great taste in books, too.)
The Huffington Post has a quick article with reader photos of their gardens. Although they say they got lots of cool photos, they picked the ones that showed a variety of ways you could do the whole gardening thing.
My garden looks most like picture No. 7. But I'm also planning to do some container planting on the deck, because I have lots of containers I don't use.
Also check out the links below the story; the Huffington Post seems to be covering the national gardening trend pretty closely. Off to read Michael Pollan's story myself ...
So, the garden is coming along much better than I expected at this point. Today there are some snow peas sprouting -- whoot! I love snow peas. And the carrots are getting all bunchy and looking good, too.
I was just out doing a little bit of weeding -- the lettuce is now mature enough that I can tell the difference between it and the weeds -- and was pulling up the hundreds of little sprouts that have taken over the lettuce square of the garden. I pulled up about two dozen before I starting smelling something yummy. Very yummy. And I realized I must be pulling up something edible.
I tasted the sprouts, and yep, it's cilantro. That part of the garden was overwhelmed with cilantro last year. I bought a plant that was already too mature, and it went to seed right away. So I kind of let it wither there.
Apparently it dropped seed all summer, and now it's starting to take hold again. I stopped pulling the sprouts because of the rain, but I'm not sure what to do now. Should I keep pulling them? Any chance they'll grow happily next to the lettuce? Should I take them out and give away the seedlings?
Sorry to my three readers -- it has been a while. My day job involves the auto industry, and if you're in southeast Michigan you'd have to be in a coma or blessedly unaware to not know how crazy the auto industry is these days. The world is crazed, and so am I.
Good news! I have sprouts! My lettuce, radishes and carrots all have teeny tiny sprouts out in the garden. The entire garden is overwhelmed with weeds, though, so I need to figure out how to get those buggers out while preserving the baby shoots. I'm still waiting for the snow peas to sprout -- I'm kind of surprised that they aren't already sprouting, so we'll see what happens.
No progress yet on expanding the Plant-A-Row program throughout the town. I'm looking for a dropoff/pickup spot. Need to send a letter to the Dexter Leader talking about the program once I find a good dropoff spot, and then may try to host a speaker at the library on food insecurity issues.
I came across this story today on Farmer's Markets. It's very interesting, and shows the progession of Farmer's Markets from a cheap way to sell vegetables to locals to something else entirely.
If the recent posting on composting got you thinking about starting a rotting pile of your own, here's a link to a great resource on compost piles. It's on a site called "Emily Compost -- Celebrating Gardening, Plants and Weeds." Looks like it could be a site I refer back to a lot!
We just got back from a week in New Jersey visiting the homestead, and I now have to scramble around and make the house look nice for visiting relatives who get here in two hours. Yikes. I am happy to say it looks like the Plant A Row efforts are already taking off at St. Joe's -- I've got the PDF for some fliers in my email box, and folks are seem to be gearing up to get this thing going. Next week I'll put some effort into expanding it beyond St. Joe's.
I'm happy to report that the snow this week hasn't hurt my budding garden. Looks like the weeds are very healthy and hardy! Also, I think there are some radish sprouts starting to take hold. And quite possibly some lettuce. I'm resisting the urge to weed, even though the garden really needs it, until I can really tell what's in there. Knowing me, I'll weed all the good veggies out.
When I was in New Jersey, I went looking for some Jersey Tomato seedlings, but couldn't find any. It's probably too early, I know, but I'd love to have a nice Jersey Tomato plant for my own use this summer ...
First Lady Michelle Obama has planted her own row for the hungry at the White House. They're calling it the "White House Kitchen Garden," and they plan to use some of the produce for themselves and donate some to Miriam's Kitchen in D.C.
It's a big garden. I mean, any garden that has two paths running through it is pretty large. I can't imagine Michelle really did all that raking herself, especially in those fancy boots and nice sweater. They're growing spinach, broccoli, lettuce, herbs, shallots, onions, shelling peas, fennel and chard. Interestingly, they're not growing what many home gardeners usually take on: Tomatoes and squash. I wonder if that's because they plan on donating most of it. Tomatoes don't really travel well -- they tend to squish easily. And squash, while one of my all-time favorite veggies, is in bountiful supply at the end of the summer.
A story in last week's Free Press says a local Detroit man wants to start a for-profit farm within the city borders. If you step back and think about the transformation of Detroit over the last fifty years, from before the race riots in the 1960s to where it stands today, it's an incredible change. The amount of vacant land in Detroit can be kind of unnerving -- it feels, at times, like an abandoned city. Nothing like it once was.
Urban farming has been on the rise in Detroit for the past few years, with community activists getting together to plant gardens on abandoned lots. Now John Hantz wants to take that one step further, and make a business that would plant veggies, use wind turbines for energy, grow Christmas trees, and even compete with some suburban farms by selling cider and offering pony rides. It's a great idea, if Hantz can swing it, because he's looking for the city and state to donate some land or sell it to him at a nominal cost.
At the end of the story, the comments from the community farming activist kind of surprised me, because you'd think there's more than enough room for both community farming and for-profit farming. In fact, some of the workers trained through the community farms may actually end up with jobs at a for-profit farm, no? But there wasn't much room for the woman to speak in the story, so maybe she had more to say that didn't make it in. I'll be interested to see how the city, which desperately needs new businesses, reacts to this idea.
It's raining today, and out in the driveway there were three big, fat earthworms. I was tempted to scoop them up and drop them in my garden, but ick. Worms. Maybe I'll get the kids to do it.
For the record, I've already planted a few cold-weather seeds. I put in a row of snow peas, radishes, lettuce, and carrots. Like I mentioned before, I'm really not a great gardener. Not sure if it's too early for those seeds. The last day of frost in the Ann Arbor area is supposedly May 15th, but that seems a little late to me. I'm hoping it's earlier, but either way these seeds supposedly like the cold. There are a few sprouts in the garden already, but I can't tell if they're weeds or plants. If they're plants, uh oh. I pulled some and threw them out already.
I guess we'll find out soon enough.
I also started a compost pile. We used to compost quite a bit when we lived in New Jersey, but stopped once we moved to Michigan. I have a weird love of compost. I love not throwing food away, knowing that the egg shells and strawberry tops and old banana peels can do some good in just a few months. For this compost pile, I was determined not to spend any money. So I'm using our crock pot as a temporary storage spot in the kitchen. We usually only use the crock pot in the winter, so I put a plastic bowl inside and just toss the scraps in there until I'm ready to bring them out back.
I don't know too much about composting, but I keep my compost piles meat and bread-free. I only throw in vegetable matter, fruit castoffs, coffee grinds and egg shells. No sugar, nothing processed, no chicken bones. I honestly can't remember if I'm doing that because that's what you're supposed to do, or if I'm just weird.
This is Clara. She's 91 in this video (93 now, in later videos) demonstrating how her mother cooked cheaply during the Depression. They ate a lot of potatoes and pasta, she says. If you listen closely, at one point on this video she says, "We were fat, we were eating potatoes."
Odd, that statement. We were fat. During the Depression, when people stood in line for food and one year, 25% of the population was unemployed. We were fat. You know why? Because not everyone who's struggling to eat is actually starving. Some folks have enough money to buy some food, and they choose what suits them best: Food that lasts, food that is high in calories, and food that leaves them feeling satisfied, at least intially.
That's phenomenon is called "food insecurity," and it's something that's spreading in Michigan these days as more and more people lose their job or struggle with pay cuts. Food insecurity is not neccesarily hunger, but it's one of the issues that food banks try to address. Food Gatherers recently published a study on food insecurity in Washtewnaw County. Among their more interesting findings:
* Fresh vegetables aren't easy to access in poorer neighborhoods; Detroit and the city of Ypsilanti don't have supermarkets within their borders. Of the 124 stores in Washtenaw County that accept food stamps, only 36 sell fresh produce.
* National studies show that high fat, high sugar foods are much cheaper than fresh fruits, vegetables and lean protein. To that point: $1 can buy about $1,200 calories in cookies or chips, but only 230 calories of carrots.
* There's a clear link between poverty and poor health. In our county, about 32.1% of the general population has high cholesterol. But of those making less than $35,000 a year, 64.7% have high cholesterol. Just over 18% of the general population is obese, but 26.5% of the poorer population is obese.
* Low-income families have an extremely high rate of food insecurity, with about 92% of parents saying they saying often skip meals or dole out smaller portions to make food last longer.
That's where planting a row for the hungry comes in. If we can bring the produce from our harvest to Food Gatherers, they will distribute it to food banks, pantries, and to where ever else there is a need. The discussion on food insecurity makes me think about all the food I've donated to food banks in the past -- boxes of stuffing (lasts long, but is it all that healthy?), cereal, canned vegetables, soup (filling, but very high in sodium.) It would be lovely to help people feed their families the same way I try to feed my own: With healthy foods.
Still, all that said, I love Clara and her Youtube cooking lessons, and am really tempted to make the Poor Man's meal for the kids. Hot dogs and fried potatoes -- oh my!
It's the last Sunday in March, and I'm sitting in my guest room overlooking the little nameless pond in Huron Farms. In early March, the pond thawed from the rigid chunk of ice it'd had been since early November. And now it's teeming with life again. There's the two swans who make a home here all summer, a handful of Canadian geese, a muskrat or two, the Blue Heron who visits every few days. Everyone's back. Although it's a gray, cold, windy day, spring is definitely on its way to Dexter. And boy am I grateful.
A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to attend a meeting at the Interfaith Council for Peace & Justice in Ann Arbor to hear a presentation on community gardens. They're encouraging churches and other faith-based communities to plant gardens they can all tend together, and help feed the hungry in Washtenaw County. There are lots of good reasons to do this -- lots of reasons I'll get into further this spring. But one idea really stuck in my head.
It's called "Plant a Row for the Hungry", and it goes like this: Gardeners agree to plant an extra row or square or whatever they can spare in their vegetable gardens. Come harvest time, there's one collection spot where people bring in their produce. A volunteer brings all that produce to a food bank (we'd use Food Gatherers, because they're all set up to do this already), where it's weighed and then delivered to needy families. We keep a running tally of how much food we've collected, and at the end of the harvest we hold a little shin dig to celebrate.
That's it. So simple. Someone really should do this.
So why not me? Well, there's lots of reasons why not. I've got a husband in law school, which makes me practically a single mom. Three kids. A full-time job, and a very tiny garden.
But I can't stop thinking about this idea. How simple it sounds. How much of a need there is for fresh food in our county's food banks. How desperate and chilling these economic times seem, at least here in Michigan. How filled up we might all feel if we were able to do something, even if it's just putting some seeds in the dirt and watching some sprouts grow. How really good and awesome this could turn out to be.
So I'm starting this, today. Expect to be hearing more from me about this. If you're a store owner in Dexter whom I deal with, expect to hear from me about how you can help. If you're a home owner in Dexter, expect to hear from me about how easy it is to start a garden. If you're already a gardener, expect to hear about what kinds of produce really is in demand around here (here's a hint: it's not tomatoes or squash.) If you're a church leader or school leader or Scouts leader and you want to join in, keep on coming here as the plan develops. And If you're someone else, somewhere else, and you're interested in how this all turns out, watch this space. I'll keep you all posted.
As someone who's made her life writing, I still remember crafting my college essay. It was the first time I thought, "Hey, maybe I could do this writing thing for a living."
