Veggies all year long
Children harvested dill for their summer camp pickles.
On the sixth day of Give-mas, we bring you-- vegetables! Remember in this early post how we talked about the farm as a classroom? We also use it like a laboratory where we experiment new-to-us varieties of vegetables like bitter melon and malabar spinach. Your E.A.T. South farmers are complete plant nerds. Just ask our volunteers. When asked, “can we grow that, here?” You’re likely to hear, “let’s try it!” We also grow lots of things familiar to us like field peas and okra.
We manage the farm to demonstrate that here in Alabama we can grow healthy delicious food all year round. Right now, you’ll find baby carrots, lettuce, purple mustard, Amara mustard (the farmer’s favorite, and she’s likely to hand you a piece to try), kale, tiny collards (the chickens like them as much as we do and ate the first planting!), turnips, beets, pak choi, tat soi. And that’s just the fall!
Carrots on their way to becoming snacks at the Therapeutic Recreation Center.
In the summer, we grow heirloom vegetables (heirlooms are old plants connected to the story of a person or place): cushaw squash, crimson red okra, strawberry popcorn, and new-to-us plants like purple sweet potatoes.
Now you’re wondering, “what do you do with all that produce?” That’s the most common question we hear behind, “what do you do about squirrels?” Mostly, we feed them (the veggies, not the squirrels) to children during field trips. Right now, we have about thirty pounds of purple sweet potatoes, and children who tour the farm are finding out that sweet potatoes can be purple and taste good, too. In the summer, we sent children (and lots of other people, too) to the garden to eat as many cherry tomatoes as they could hold.
We also give the produce away. Our monthly Community Projects end with a harvest, and volunteers take home tomatoes, basil or field peas and sometimes new thing or two to try. When we have an excess of something like kale, we pack it in boxes for the food bank.
Once upon a time, we staffed a farmers market booth. With just two people on staff, we had to refocus on our mission of education. Standing around selling vegetables didn’t seem like a good use of our time.
Volunteers from Maxwell Air Force Base help bring in the sweet potato harvest.
We’d like to return to selling produce in a way that connects directly to youth education. Our dream is to start an entrepreneurship program that provides teens with a structure to learn about growing, marketing and selling food. To reach that dream, we need additional resources and probably another staff person. If you are inspired by connecting children and the community with good food, please give today.