I’ve been thinking quite a bit about this subject, even more with Thanksgiving approaching. It’s an annual feast, where people eat and eat and eat until they’re ready to pass out at the table. And there are so many people in this country, and around the world, that would give anything to be able to eat a full meal, much less an opportunity to eat your fill. And that’s what this is about, a simple enough idea for people to help someone else with very, very little cost and effort. All it takes is a bit of compassion for someone hungry and the time it takes to pick a few vegetables and drop them off at a neighbor’s house.
I had a garden this year for the first time. We tore up some lawn and turned in a bunch of compost and planted seeds for lettuce and sugar snap peas and cucumbers, and planted seedlings for 3 types of tomatoes, zucchini, and a few other things.
We somehow had a monster plant emerge from the group. A Roma tomato plant, it went crazy. I was able to average 40 – 75 tomatoes a day from the crazy thing. I put a lot into ziplock bags and tucked them away in the freezer. Even at that, I couldn’t keep up and use them all. So we did what a lot of people do when they have more fresh produce than they can use, they put it in a bag, lug it to work, and invite people to take whatever they want.
This is the haul from ONE Roma tomato plant this summer, along with a monster cucumber and a couple of Beefsteak tomatoes.
If you’ve ever grown tomatoes, you’ve probably had excess, and done the same thing. It never fails, you can’t plan meals around things growing, the timing never works out, you end up with shortages and abundance, it’s the way it goes.
So here’s a plan to feed people that are without food. I invite you to pass the link to this post all around, forward it to friends and family, share it with neighbors, and see just how many people you can feed with very little effort.
The whole idea is this- plant one more than you’ll use. If you plant one tomato plant for your family, plant a second one for someone in need. If you plant two cucumber vines for yourself, plant one more for someone that’s hungry. It’s that simple. Really, it’s that simple.
Watering one extra plant won’t put much of a dent in your day, and weeding it won’t be much of a hassle either. The sunshine won’t cost you anything extra, if you use compost, you won’t need any fertilizer, if you have a bird feeder nearby, the birds will do a pretty remarkable job keeping pests at bay.
So, you’ve just harvested some goodies from the garden, and you have extra that you can’t use right away. What do you do with it? Call on your neighbors. Here’s how it would work.
Find someone on your block to volunteer to be the collection point for excess produce in the neighborhood. Drop it off daily, or even biweekly. Get hold of your local food pantry, and make arrangements for them to come by and pick it up, or get a volunteer in your block to bring the fresh food in to the pantry. Or rotate delivery people, get your neighbors to take turns running it to the pantry.
If the pantry can’t make use of it, get in touch with Meals for Wheels or other similar setups, where people who are housebound have meals delivered to them. Have them add a couple of tomatoes or a cucumber to the deliveries to shut ins. You could offload a lot of food that way, and it’d be a nice addition to the usual delivered meals.
So, what if there’s more than people can use? Easy. Can it. Get in touch with church groups or schools, and see if you can find someone that would donate the use of their facilities for preparing and preserving food. Cafeterias at schools or churches. Or a company that has a cafeteria on premises. Even if you had to put together a crew to do it at night, it’s doable. A dozen or so of people could prepare a lot of food in a few short hours.
Then go find sweet little old ladies that know all about putting up produce for the Winter. Invite younger people to help out, they will learn from the pros, and they can continue helping out once they know how it all works. Get a troop of Girl Scouts involved, let them earn a badge for helping out. They could help by cleaning and sorting, helping to box up the finished batches of food. Or put them to work shredding lettuce and help making fresh salads that could be put into a ziplock bag and delivered to the homebound, or put into the food pantries.
You could chop tomatoes and bell peppers and garlic and basil from the garden, then simmer up some tomato sauce for use as a base for spaghetti sauce. Or a nice tomato base for soup. Make salsa by the gallon. Put it in jars and put it up.
It’s that simple. Plant one more than you can use. Get neighbors to do the same. Collect the excess from neighbors. Deliver it to a food pantry. Nothing goes to waste, and you can put good food into the homes of people that have been doing without. If ten houses planted just one extra tomato plant as I did, and got that many fresh tomatoes out of it as I did, that’s a minimum of 400 fresh tomatoes a day from just ten neighbors. That’s a lot of food, fresh food, good for you food, otherwise too expensive to afford to buy at the stores when you’re broke food.
Multiply this by the number of houses on each block. A couple of blocks of neighbors getting on board with this idea could fill a local pantry to overflowing in no time. If it’s too much food, then send it to nursing homes, send it to school cafeterias, send it where it can be used.
Plant one more than you can use. Feeding the hungry where you live is just that simple. Start talking with neighbors now, while the weather is cool. It’s a perfect time to go tear out some sod on a sunny patch of lawn and turn some good compost into the ground and getting it ready. If you plant seeds in the spring and have extra, give the excess seed to a neighbor and ask them to plant them somewhere, then drop off the food that comes in at the collection point.
There’s no excuse for people going hungry when you do something as simple as this.
Plant one more than you can use and help change the world.