A Joint Effort

by Albert Brian Vick  Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, Community Kitchen Garden Coordinator

Another good day in the Lewis Ginter Community Kitchen Garden (CKG).  Well, it really wasn’t a “day”, it was a 3-hour work session with more than a dozen volunteers, so that’s a week of work for one person. And one person really can’t do the job of harvesting the entire Community Kitchen Garden –- the scale is that significant.

These hands look professional, yet they belong to a focused Youth Volunteer Program team member.

One of the neatest things about today is that we worked both ends of the process: on the front end we made an effort to start more tomato plants, and we also delivered 545 pounds of extremely fresh vegetables to FeedMore’s Community Kitchen.

You're looking at 391 pounds of high quality, fresh tomatoes. We also delivered another 154 pounds of high quality zucchini and yellow squash.

High-quality tomatoes represented 391 pounds of the total delivery. What are “Hanover” tomatoes going for in the market… $3.50 per pound? That donation has serious retail value, but more importantly, it’s fresh and powerful nutrition for those members of our community served by the Community Kitchen.

Definitely a "hands-on" experience.

The other cool aspect is that we had Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden’s teen Youth Volunteer Program work hand in hand with some of Lewis Ginter’s volunteers. Overall, we planted 105 tomato cuttings in new pots  with a goal of extending the tomato yield into early October.

I know my CKG posts have been pretty bubbly, but it’s not like we don’t have our challenges: hot days, powdery mildew, squash bugs, birds, critters in general. We’ve been fortunate so far. Now the battle against the elements and the pests is on, to try to preserve good production through the remainder of the season.