The Summer of Giving Back

A carload of produce

For more than a decade, the community garden my wife, Betty, and I manage has had a good working relationship with our local ‘food pantry’, which provides a grocery-store-type experience for Medfield’s food-insecure families. Until this year, though, apart from contributions from our own plot, my involvement was primarily posting (via email to our member gardeners) a pickup schedule provided by one of our gardeners who is also on the food pantry’s board. I knew we were ‘doing good’ but had little insight into the process.

In March, that gardener notified me she needed to take the 2022 season off and asked if could Betty and I could fill in for her. Without hesitation, we said, “sure.” That’s when we found out what ‘being involved’ really means. It is a lesson that will stay with us for a very long time.

Our 75-plot community garden formally opens in April; but until early May the ground is too cold to grow much of anything except leaf greens. Our first collection of 2022 was little more than a few bags of lettuce and arugula.

This abandoned plot was planted
specifically for food pantry use

Something else, though, had also happened in the first month of the gardening season: several gardeners dropped out, and we had already exhausted our wait list. Our inspirational solution was to turn those vacant plots over to volunteers willing to plant crops specifically for the food pantry. Three plots were quickly covered in seeds, plugs, and plants.

I also confess my dormant business background was aroused from its 17-year-long slumber. For years, donations for the food cupboard went into two wheelbarrows at the garden’s main entrance. There are, however, no fewer than five entrances from the street. Thanks to a mechanically inclined member of the garden, we have at least ten working carts and wheelbarrows. I deployed all of them in such a way it was impossible to enter or leave the garden without passing at least two barrows.

To enter or exit the garden, you have
to walk by wheelbarrows

Further, specific ‘sweep’ times were established. The Medfield Food Cupboard requests a single delivery at 3 p.m. on Tuesday. Because gardeners have varying work and life schedules, Betty and I made certain everyone knew we would pick up produce from the wheelbarrows on Monday at sunset, Tuesday morning after the ‘early shift’ gardeners had left, and Tuesday afternoon at 2:30. And, if you couldn’t get to the garden, a volunteer would carefully pick you plot in your absence.

Suddenly, we had a carload of produce for each distribution.

We were aware there was a smaller distribution organized on Saturdays for home-bound clients of the food cupboard. One Friday morning, we offered produce for it and were told it wasn’t needed. “But,” our food cupboard contact told us, “you might see if the food pantry in Medway can use it.”

The Medway Village Food Pantry
with our produce on display

The Medway Village Church Food Pantry was indeed interested. On some weeks we were now organizing twice-weekly drives. How could we keep gardeners interested in contributing more frequently? Betty’s innate marketing skills came into play. We began soliciting photos of our produce arrayed for the two towns distributions. We emailed these beautifully composed photos, together with testimonials, to our gardeners. Contributions rose apace.

We are now in the final third of September. The Great Zucchini Glut is behind us and tomatoes no longer fill an entire crate; but I see winter squash ripening in plots, kale continuing to grow, and an emerging bounty of spinach and greens. We’ll keep contributing until there is a hard freeze.

We send our gardeners photos of
their contributions on display

This has been a learning experience; an eye-opener of major proportions. I get urgent emails from gardeners who couldn’t get to their plots but who don’t want their green beans to go to waste. Can we pick them? Yesterday, a gardener fretted her eggplant, though ripe, are still too hard and so might be rejected by food cupboard clients. I told her what the head of the Medway pantry told me: not only does every vegetable go; they’re the first thing to disappear off the tables.

By Betty’s count, we’re making as many as twelve trips a week to the community garden to collect produce, devoting additional hours to harvesting gardens that are not our own, turning over a corner of our basement to be a vegetable sorting and packing center, and making at least one delivery every week to a food pantry. It has been a busy summer and a satisfying season of sharing.