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August 3, 2022Food insecurity isn’t just a lack of food but a lack of access to healthy foods. Our Food Justice Garden aims to remedy this by providing high-quality, nutritious foods to local food pantries.
Over the years, our gardeners have experimented with different varieties of seeds to provide larger amounts of these nutritious diet staples.
A few examples are spinach and okra. Anyone who has grown these vegetables at home knows the common pitfalls from spinach wilting in the southern heat to okra growing into a woody, useless fruit in no time.
For spinach, our garden uses the Malabar variety of spinach, native to tropical Asian countries such as India and Sri Lanka. It is heat tolerant, vining and self-seeding. So far this year, we have harvested nearly 70 pounds of spinach. Volunteers usually harvest more than 150 pounds of spinach a year from June to November.
Most home gardeners use the Clemson spineless variety of okra seeds. Our garden grows Burmese okra seeds, which produce 7” to 12″ long okra that is tender even at that longer length. Each year, from July to October, our plants produced from 100 to 200 pounds of okra.
Squash is another vegetable that provides abundance and variety for our food pantry partners. These plants produce large squashes that can easily feed some of the larger, multi-generational families that come to food pantries. One variety, in particular, is called candy roaster squash which is reportedly sweet enough to use in a pie.
Volunteers are always welcome in the garden, even families with young children! Many hands make light work and the vines will be heavy with fruits and vegetables for the next few months. Our garden workdays are Tuesday and Saturday mornings beginning at 9 a.m.
Questions? Contact Bobi Gallagher or Joanie Novak.
Check out our July totals from the garden!
