Every home gardener knows the problem. Everything looked good in the seed catalog and you grew way too many vegetables for your family. Suddenly you have too many beans or peas, too much lettuce, or (common problem!) more zucchini than anyone could have imagined.
Here is something that you can do with your overflowing harvest, to help those in need, and to help answer President Obama's call for community volunteerism (see Delivering on Change: 100th Day Challenge): Donate your extra harvest to your local food bank or soup kitchen.
Here's all you have to do:
1. Find a local food bank by looking at Food Pantries; A Directory of Food Banks and Soup Kitchens Across America.
2. Check with them for any guidelines about donations and for the time of day when donations are accepted.
3. Be sure that you donate produce that is in good condition--the very stuff you would serve to your own family.
There! Garden away! Plant some extra rows! Don't hold back!
5 comments:
A wonderful idea, Clair! We always have extras, but never have trouble finding homes for our vegetables and fruits. Our neighbors love getting them and they always go quickly when Tom carries them into work. He is a maintenance worker and most of his fellow workers are struggling working folks just like us who really appreciate the fresh stuff.
Beth, you just reawakened a memory. We kids used to try to drag our mother out into the backyard with some excuse or other so she wouldn't hear the doorbell. Why? Because we had just spotted that nice Mr. Peterson coming across the road with yet another bag of Swiss chard from his overabundant garden!
Excellent idea! I'm also going to have a surplus of vegetable seedlings that I'm going to offer through our local freecycle.
About that vegetable from our childhood (I dare not speak its name). It took me decades to get over the trauma of that blechy stuff - many years of fighting the urge to run screaming from the grocery store when the new crop showed up in the produce section.
ok, that's a slight exaggeration.
After many years of fearing chard, dear Bucky, I actually planted some--Bright Lights Mix from Burpee. They were very pretty, and tasty, too.
However, I never forgot how we (as kids) used to stick the chard under our plates when no one was looking, then how we had to suffer the chard juice running down our legs for the rest of the meal. Mother must have wondered why we were so eager to clear the table and do the dishes on those nights.
The first example is an illustration of the comment ~ when we went fishing for halibut and salmon in Alaska, we always shared with our friends (our freezers were overwhelmed) as everyone did it!
Last summer Greg's tomatoes were beautiful and they bloomed aplenty so they were given to neighbors and friends.
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