Hmm, then I can't figure out your problem Badger- sorry.


News in my vegetable gardening life:

This was my first complete year with my new large vegetable garden.
Everything but the tomatoes I grew from directly seeding in the ground, and I had quite a lot of surplus veggies of various kinds all summer. Mostly lettuce, but other stuff as well. Right now I have surplus scallions, kale, lettuce, and some extra cherry tomatoes...but all through the summer I was giving away literally bags full of lettuce, chard, cucumbers, etc.

Well it suddenly dawned on my last month that pretty much all the friends I was giving extra veggies and greens to all summer could afford to buy their own vegetables. A light bulb went off in my head and I realized I probably should be giving this surplus to people who were in trouble. (like, duh) Many people are jobless and are really having a hard time nowadays.

So I found out info about my town's Silent Food Pantry, and I've started bringing bags of fresh lettuce, cherry tomatoes, and kale. The bags disappeared, and I brought more. There was always canned beans and rice, macaroni&cheese mix etc there,...but there seemed a need for more fresh produce.

I saw what a good thing all these dozen or so volunteers in my town were doing, so I decided to volunteer to work at the pantry too, a few hours each month.
So simply because of my vegetable garden, I'm now working a shift at the food pantry once a week and finding the best use for my extra home grown produce. It feels good.

I also found this cool site:
http://www.ampleharvest.org/about.php
It's a national registry where food pantries and home gardeners can find each other. Pantries can list themselves, and vegetable gardeners can go there and punch in their zip code to find out where their nearest needy food pantry is- so that home gardeners have a place to bring their surplus harvest where it will really be appreciated.

If you have extra produce from your garden that you can't preserve or store, or if you know of a local food pantry that should register, please contact the site and help make the connection work.