We had a great night on Thursday! The mild weather made for a great week of harvesting produce and was perfect for a night spent with community members at the garden. At the Easton Urban farm on Thursday morning, we harvested plentiful amounts of squash, three types of onions, kale, beets, and more. The day before, Yvonne from the Friends & Family Garden on Walnut Street donated a few coolers full of collard greens, which helped us create a colorful display of vegetables. Many thanks to the Nurture Nature Center, as well, who donated produce grown in their Urban Recycle Garden on Pine St. Many thanks to Ken Jones, Mercantile Home, and the Lynn St Gardeners for allowing us to harvest this week at their plot. We helped ourselves to the yellow (wax) beans, a little bit of basil, and a couple of the large squash. Your peppers are looking great and hopefully we will be able to harvest a few next week!
We featured some great recipes this week, which we will have available again next Thursday. Our recipes are now also available for download on our website: http://sites.lafayette.edu/vic/recipes/. Thank you to Esther Guzman, who helped with the translations of these recipes into Spanish, and made valuable contributions to some of our other promotional materials.
Next Thursday, we are looking forward to working with our partners from Easton Hospital. They will be hosting a cooking demonstration next to the 10th & Pine Community Garden, using some of the same produce we are featuring at the Farm Stand.
Thank you as well to The Morning Call photographer, Michael Kubel, for coming out to document our Farm Stand. You can see more of the pictures from Thursday night at the link below.
Pictures: Easton’s Veggie Van. July 17, 2014. Michael Kubel, The Morning Call. http://www.mcall.com/news/local/easton/mc-pictures-eastons-veggie-van-20140717,0,1793655.photogallery
Last Thursday night, we had our first distribution at the South 10th and Pine Street community garden! It was great to finally be able to share our vegetables with the West Ward Neighborhood. At the beginning of the week, Andrew, Alexa and I were convinced that all we would have at the stand would be zucchini and summer squash since we already had over fifty pounds from the Urban Farm, but Thursday morning we realized there were plenty of other vegetables ready to be harvested! At the stand we had swiss chard, beets, kohlrabi, yellow onions, green onions, sugar snap peas, snow peas and shell peas, radishes, kale, and squash from the Urban Farm, collard greens and purslane from Yvonne’s garden on Walnut Street, and beans and green onions from our own garden at Lafarm. In total, we had over 285 pounds of produce!
Thursday even though it rained the entire time we were there. We recognized a few faces from attending the Kellyn Foundation’s cooking demonstrations at Summer nights where we handed out flyers about the stand. Everyone was thrilled to receive so many of the vegetables and most were even willing to try new things! Not many people had heard of kohlrabi before, but when we told them we had a recipe that incorporated it, they wanted to try it. I enjoyed handing out the vegetables and being able to tell each person a little bit about what they were getting. It was wonderful to see how much people appreciated getting the vegetables and seemed to me like they really valued the food that they were receiving. I’m hoping that we can learn from this distribution and make some improvements for next week. I’m interested to see if many people come back again, and if we have new faces. Also, I’m curious to see if more people come if it doesn’t rain and if they hang around the garden or still leave right after getting their veggies. Looking forward to next Thursday night!!
December 2013, community leaders rallied in support behind the students’ ideas and hard work over the last year. We heard accounts that the Veggie Van helps parents to provide healthy meals for their children by providing vegetables in their neighborhood at no cost. We learned that, through the Veggie Van, children are able to connect lessons about nutrition, learned in school and at after-school care, with their home life and their diet. Community leaders explained that members of our community are eagerly waiting for next summer, when the Veggie Van would return again to the West Ward.
Ward neighborhood of Easton. This vision, set by participants in the Tech Clinic program, is ambitious. It will require participants to be motivated to learn and apply new knowledge and information quickly. Participants will need to be adept at problem solving and creating innovative solutions. When I was asked to join the project team last winter, I knew that I wanted to be involved, even through I didn’t know exactly what I was getting into. That’s the power of a strong vision- it inspires and excites by shining a light on the unknown. Their vision empowered me to make a commitment to serving with my community and helped me to work through early logistical hurdles with our advisors and my peers on this project, Rachel and Alexa.
