Community Kitchen Garden: All Good Things Must Come to an End (But Only Temporarily!)

by Janine Butler, Garden Volunteer, Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden

Sadly, this will be the last edition of blog posts about the Community Kitchen Garden for this growing season. We have harvested the last of the fall crops, and the vegetable garden is being put to bed until next spring.

Last week we delivered the remaining cabbages, cauliflower’s, mustard greens and broccoli to the FeedMore foodbank, that serves Meals on Wheels of Virginia and the Central Virginia Foodbank.

After the final weigh-in the grand total weight of produce grown throughout the summer and fall was 9,166 pounds! That’s fantastic! Back in the spring we set a goal of growing 10,000 pounds to contribute to the Feedmore kitchen to help supplement the 4,000 meals they make each day. While we didn’t quite make that lofty goal, we came pretty close – close enough, in fact, to call it an outstanding success!

It’s amazing what can be accomplished with a little hard work (ok, maybe a lot of hard work!). Volunteering at Lewis Ginter has been a very rewarding experience for me, especially working on the Community Kitchen project. Knowing that people have directly benefited from what we have accomplished feels great and I am proud to have been a part of this community. There have been many volunteers that have contributed to the success of this project, and we thank them all for their time and effort.
Plans are already underway for next year! Tom Brinda, Assistant Director at Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden, is already working on coordinating the program again for next year.  This weekend he will plant the ground cover that will help prepare the soil for next season.

We hope that you have enjoyed reading about the progress of the garden, and look forward to bringing you new veggie news in 2010!