Posts Tagged: garden

Community Sharing Garden Restoration Project

This reflection comes from Bruce Kelsh, Chair of Earth and Social Justice Committee for First Presbyterian Church, in Cottage Grove, OR. Fifty percent of the people in our rural community are classified as being in poverty or ALICE (Asset Limited Income Constrained), that is, the working poor.  There is a shortage of fresh produce for… Read more »

Resources for Refugee Gardens

Planning your church refugee garden

Are you interested in beginning your own church refugee garden? We’re sharing these documents created by Arrive Ministries to support your endeavor and help address some frequently asked questions.

Contact a local refugee organization or Catholic Charities to see what programs may already exist and to begin developing relationships with refugees in your area.

Church Garden Models contains a listing of the types of refugee gardens that have been established here in the Twin Cities. There are a number of different ways churches can engage in gardens; you may even come up with new ideas of your own!

Church Gardening Goals provides a list of reasons for churches to create gardens for refugees. These reasons are some of the ones cited by those hosting church gardens and refugee gardeners and are helpful in enlisting support of your local church board and membership.

Church Gardens Sample Guidelines is a list of rules based on First Evangelical Free Church (Maplewood) Harvest Community Gardens model. Many area churches develop a similar list and provide it to gardeners at the start of the season, usually as a part of gardener orientation. First Evangelical Free Church has many years experience of conducting a community garden on a large scale. In 2014 they had more than 1200 plots!

Matters to Consider is a document that has been compiled through evaluations and discussions with existing church gardens. These are their suggestions to others – things they felt everyone should be aware of before beginning a garden project.

 

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES ~ Gardening, Food & Faith

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Fancy Irrigation for Church Garden: A (somewhat) Cautionary Tale

Tell us about the project?

We were able to successfully install two rain barrels off the side of Immanuel Presbyterian Church (Indianapolis) that connects to an underground piping system. This piping system exits the ground inside the garden. Soaker hoses can be attached to the exit to water the garden or volunteers can put a watering can underneath the faucet. There is also a stand-alone rain barrel inside the garden. A watering can be filled by lifting the lid to the rain barrel & then dispersed in the garden. This will cut down the cost of maintaining the garden & make it easier for volunteers to water the garden.
Who was involved?
We had five adults and three kids participate in building the rain barrel system. We had seven kids & two adults plant the vegetables in the garden. Since installing, we have had 7 families volunteer to help care for the garden this summer as well as our church’s Boy Scout troop.
Anything unexpected?
We spent about 5 weekends working on rain barrels instead of the planned 1-2 weekends. We had great difficulty gathering volunteers at the same time to complete a project of this size.
Challenging? Anything you’d do differently next time?
Installing the rain barrels next to the side of the building posed a challenge. A hill goes off that side of the building (which is what you need for the underground piping) and it took two times setting the rain barrels in order for them to not slant. The difficulty in getting volunteers for this project was also a challenge. We will not attempt a construction project this large any year in the near future. If a large project needs to be done again, we will break it up over many months into smaller much more manageable sections in order to get more volunteer participation.
What would you would encourage others to do if they try to replicate something similar in their area?
Do your research in how to install rain barrels properly. This project is not a cheap expense. Our grant money provided $300 of this project this year. Last year we raised $100 that was used in this installation. In addition, the family that oversees this project donated an additional $300 in order to make this project fully operational. So you will need much more than $300 to complete a project of this size. In addition, consider creating a committee of people in charge of completing an outdoor project of this scale, break the project up in small sections and designate individuals to oversee that portion of the project. Plan the project throughout the winter & have the individuals price out the parts needed per section to better estimate costs. Then, accomplish each section slowly throughout the entire length of spring, summer, & fall. Therefore, it will be fully complete in a year’s time. We would also would recommend finding somewhere that the produce can be donated fresh instead of preserved. It is much less work and much easier to get volunteers.
Has this experience changed your church and community in any way?
We are in the interim search process for a new pastor and this project was one of the experiences we have shared that demonstrates some of the success and challenges of undertaking something of this size during a time of transition.  It also is helping us continue to grow in our relationship with people who are under-resourced with access to fresh produce and the programs/churches helping them with on-site assistance.
Anything else?
Our congregation has been blessed with a young adult couple (Kelly and Brad Shinabargar) who are passionate about growing healthy food and helping our congregation’s children learn how to garden.  They also have a passion for helping people who are under-resourced and the growth of this garden over the course of three growing seasons has been tremendous thanks to their determination, creativity, energy and imagination. We could not have accomplished this project without them and are grateful to God for their commitment to the Youth Garden!

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Not just a garden

Valley Verde (Green Valley) is located in the Santa Clara Valley in California. PHP provided a first-time grant to them for their work in 2013 to address poverty and food insecurity among vulnerable California residents living in low-income neighborhoods in Gilroy and San Jose. Most of the participants are recent immigrants. Valley Verde provides everything they need to establish organic home gardens and the residents take it from there with support and guidance from mentors throughout the year. Here is Esperanza’s story.

Esperanza, a mother of two children pictured here, is growing healthy food for her family.

Back in her home country Esperanza wanted to have a career. She went to college and studied business. When her husband decided to move to the US in search of better employment opportunities, Esperanza didn’t want to follow him. But then she realized that staying alone with her daughters didn’t feel right. About a year ago, she moved to the US to join her husband. At the beginning, she struggled to find a sense of community and to access healthy food for her family.
But that changed when she learned about the gardening program provided by Valley Verde. Esperanza had never gardened before, but her daughters were so enthusiastic about the program that she decided to take a chance. Valley Verde helped her plant a garden and taught her how to take care of it.
Esperanza now has two beautiful garden beds, and she is able to provide high-quality, organic vegetables to her children. The garden has helped Esperanza’s family economically because she no longer has to purchase some vegetables from the store. As importantly, Esperanza feels less lonely, is active and is engaging with others in the community.
“My garden really helped me to feel better and less lonely. I see how my plants are growing and changing every day and I feel good about growing my own food. I haven’t bought lettuce or cabbage for the last four months” (Esperanza, 2013).

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Kale Defeats Polar Vortex! Stony Point Center Farm Update

Gardening in winter and looking forward toward spring!
Update from our farm (by Will Summers and Kitty Ufford-Chase)
SPC greenhouse in the snow

Greetings from the winter wonderland that is the Stony Point Center!

What a winter it’s been. In the past month, we’ve had snow, snow, and more snow. And it has just kept piling up.

During one recent 24-hour stretch, we probably got about 18 inches! My major concern in a blizzard like that is the greenhouse. It’s not what’s inside the greenhouse that I’m worried about in a snowstorm, but the greenhouse itself. More than a foot of heavy, wet snow has the potential to damage the entire structure.

After this particular snowstorm, Matt and I spent an entire morning clearing snow off the greenhouse roof and then removing all the snow that had piled up on the sides that continued to put pressure on the plastic and the frame. We had to dig in the snow by hand because snow shovels can very easily puncture the greenhouse plastic. It was quite a day-I was soaking wet after spending the entire morning essentially waist-deep in the snow.
kale in greenhouse

Despite the polar vortex, our greenhouse crops continue to grow. We’ve taken extra precautions by double-covering them when weather forecasts indicate temperatures will be in the single-digits (which has been quite frequent this winter). In just the past week, our greenhouse spinach has really started to grow quickly as the days get incrementally longer. We’re still harvesting kale, collards, chard, and arugula from the greenhouse as well.

Recently we’ve put a lot of energy into preparing our greenhouse for spring seeding. In fact, by the end of February, we will have seeded lettuce, spinach, and onions that will be transplanted in the fields in March or April (assuming, of course, that all that snow eventually melts!).

Needless to say, here at Stony Point Center, all of us on the farm crew are eagerly awaiting the arrival of spring.

Peace and winter blessings,
Will (the Stony Point Center Farmer) and Kitty

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My Garden

That evening I sat on my front porch and stared at my green grass and budding bushes. I wanted to throw a 2 year old style tantrum, of not understanding why the world was so unfair. I was ready to take control of my food system. I was ready to get back to the dirt and simpler times. I was ready to turn my yard into a demonstration of how to do so. But for reasons beyond my control, I could not.


How was it that the ecological revolution I saw budding in myself and my backyard was so easily derailed by the previous industrial one of my predecessors?…


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Huerto-Garden de-of la-the Familia-Family

We have been honored to be able to support Huerto de la Familia through donations to the One Great Hour of Sharing. Huerto is a dynamic initiative which works in Oregon to expand opportunities and training in organic agriculture and business creation to families with the least access, but whom have great potential to benefit. Many of these families are Latino, thus the Spanish name. I learned a lot from these wonderful short videos Huerto created this year, and you may too.

The first film in a three-part series, Harvest of Pride: Cultivating Community features the stories of families, social workers and community practitioners. While news media continue to focus mostly on the “hunger problem”, the film points to the largely ignored epidemic of food insecurity among Latinos and immigrants.

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Empowerment Huerto de la Familia-style

woman farming
Huerto de la Familia (The Family Garden) is a partner organization that PHP supports. They do wonderful work to expand opportunities and training in organic agriculture and business creation to families with the least access, but whom have great potential to benefit. Huerto de la Familia is bringing life-changing opportunities to families in their community. Learn more about their mission, their work and how to support Huerto’s programs.

And watch their fabulous film series, “Harvest of Pride,” on their website!

 


A couple random items

1) Creative and waste-free ways to extend the life of your produce, in and out of the refrigerator

FRESH the Movie, in addition to being a great film (which you can borrow from PHP for showing) is a great resource for other things like extending the freshness of your produce!

Where you have strawberries, tomatoes or sweet corn, here are ways to store all those fruits and vegetables, especially if you’re trying to avoid using plastic bags, from the Berkeley Farmers Market. 

2) Hunger in Your County

And you can find out about hunger in your own county with this map from Feeding America which covers the entire country. I looked at the stats for the county where Louisville is located and was intrigued. The data is from 2010.

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