>> Alex Harned
This growing season, the Fernwood Helping Hands team of volunteers are flexing their gleaning skills at various generous farms across the Capital Region. ‘Gleaning’ is the practice of collecting fresh, excess food. From an abundance of lettuce and kale at the local urban Mason Street City Farm, to the endless wild blackberry bushes at Northbrook Farm, the bags of garlic scapes collected from Sea Bluff Farm, or the rows of organic cucumbers, summer squash, eggplant, chard, beans and cherry tomatoes from Northstar Organics, Fernwood NRG has been able to streamline a hefty amount of fresh organic produce from the field into community food access programs.
LifeCycles, Fernwood NRG’s partner of this project, has supported Fernwood Helping Hands to glean 1,260 pounds of produce at four farm partner sites! This has brought high quality and nutritious food directly into the hands and bellies of families in our community. Jesse Brown, a farmer at Mason Street City Farm, expressed his appreciation of this program, “The work that Fernwood Helping Hands does in the community is so necessary. As urban farmers, our mission is to grow as much food as possible and to have that food be accessible to all. Fernwood Helping Hands makes that easier by coming and harvesting and distributing some of our abundance to those in the community who need it most.”
Volunteers in the handfuls will carpool out to partner farms and take instruction from the farmers on what is ready to glean. Once finished the pick, volunteers will clean the produce on site, load it up for weighing and transport it back to the Fernwood Community Centre. There, the food is used in a range of programs from smaller meetup groups, such as a prenatal mom’s group and seniors’ lunch, to Family and Student Dinner.
David Gillis, Chef at Fernwood Community Centre, describes the process: “If we can use it in our programming to offer healthy snacks and meals, we do. If we can process it and keep it longer, we will. If we see we are running out of space, then we give it away the next day to people who use our programs. There are many outlets to feed people and that is a great feeling.” This surge of available healthy food is also engaging community members to attend programs more often. “It generates more interest for the wider public to gather and meet each other through these programs, which fosters a stronger sense of community. It is empowering to see how food can bring people together.”
While the positive aspects are plentiful, there are also barriers to sustaining these types of programs as there are so many moving, timely pieces to consider. For instance, this past growing season has been an uphill battle to start a new gleaning program. Out of the farms that have been contacted to participate this season only one out of five have been able to commit. “Recruiting new farm partners has been challenging,” explained Jesse Howardson, Farm Gleaning Coordinator of LifeCycles Project Society. “It is presumably made more so due to the season having a late start and yield of many crops being lower.” But Howardson also says it’s hard for farmers to plan for gleaning in general. “Often, farmers only have a few days between when they have to decide that they have sold all they can, or if a crop is damaged, and when the produce goes bad, and it is often stressful for neighbourhood based centres to receive perishable goods in larger quantities when they aren’t expecting it. It means our volunteers generally have to be on standby within a 48 hour period, which isn’t the most convenient or accessible at times, we just can’t get there in time.” Other barriers include lack of infrastructure and storage, which many Community Centres are facing as programs grow and the need to provide more for the community is demanded.
There is a long way to go to building a resilient local food system, but we celebrate the successes of Fernwood Helping Hands that has diverted food from the compost pile into delicious meals and mouths of thankful folks.
If you would like to get involved with Fernwood Helping Hands as a volunteer or if you know of a backyard or garden that could be gleaned, contact Alex Harned, Food Access Coordinator, at alex@fernwoodnrg.ca.
Fernwood Helping Hands also aims to grow food literacy amongst its participants and is offering a series of Food and Growing Workshops, such as 20 Minute Meal Preparation, Growing Mushroom Logs, Permaculture Basics, Agrarian Tool Repair, Cheese-Making and How to Grow & Use Medicinal Plants. These workshops provide the space to share knowledge and empower folks to learn new ideas, skills and meet new people.
More information about this Food and Growing Workshop Series is available at fernwoodnrg.ca/events-directory/food-growing-workshops.
