Olympia Kiwanis Club’s Food Bank Garden, where success is found through cooperation

Jill Severn portrait

A JOLT of Health

Eat your vegetables!

Related

Olympia High School's Freedom Farmers harvest crop at Capitol Campus food garden 

Don Leaf learned the ethic that drives the Olympia Kiwanis Club’s Food Bank Garden during his career in the County Health Department: “Thou shalt cooperate.” Indeed, protecting public health and large scale vegetable gardening and free food distribution and are both complex challenges where cooperation is the only way to succeed. And the Kiwanis Garden is definitely a success story.

It started in 1990. Phil Paulsrudd, (1916-2013) was a Kiwanian who owned land on Olympia’s west side and loved plants. He agreed to make some of his land available to grow food that would be donated to people who need it. A core group of Paulsrudd and about a dozen fellow members started planning, ploughing and planting.

Don Leaf, who has been helping lead the project since 1995, retells its history as a list of lessons they’ve learned, and how they’ve led to the creation of an ever-expanding cooperative network.

Leaf says he got involved at a time “when I didn’t have enough gardening in my life.” But clearly he and the other early volunteers were experienced gardeners. He says that the initial group “knew how to grow vegetables, but we had to learn how to distribute what we grew.”

Initially, it was a complex and ever-changing list of deliveries to various churches and organizations; since 2010, they’ve worked exclusively with the Thurston County Food Bank. In this instance, cooperation has led to symbiosis: Kiwanis maintains the Garden budget and management, and contributes to the salaries of two employees of the Food Bank, including James Wirth, the Garden manager, and Mackenzie McCall, the Food Bank’s Agricultural Program Manager.

The Kiwanis gardeners also had a lot to learn as our county’s population became more diverse. That meant expanding their repertoire by including fava beans, bok choi, tomatillos, cilantro and various kinds of cabbage, peppers and squashes. The list just keeps expanding, as the Food Bank reports to Kiwanis what flies off the shelves and what lingers.

Food tastes also shift over time. Farm manager James Wirth reports that cabbage is fast becoming the new It vegetable, so they are growing more of it.

Another learning curve involved the welcome proliferation of churches, schools, colleges, service clubs and individual gardeners who also donate fresh vegetables. These days, there are enough of them to make coordination helpful, so that the Food Bank isn’t overloaded with vegetables in the summer and short on them in the spring, fall and winter. To accommodate this need, the Kiwanis garden is growing more crops for the shoulder seasons – spring, fall and early winter. Last week they were planting out long rows of cabbage starts and had a field of winter squashes on the way for fall harvest.

Now there’s also an email list and an annual meeting of groups that sponsor gardens that grow food for the Food Bank. The “thou shalt cooperate” ethic prevails here, too. (On the Food Bank website, there’s also a helpful page of advice for individual gardeners’ donations of produce. Scroll down on this page.)

The near doubling of the county’s population since 1990, along with inflation and income inequality, steadily increased the number of people who need help to put food on the table. So the Garden continues to expand, now nearing three acres. This includes two big gardens on the westside, and a third, since 2010, on the east Capitol Campus, which is gardened by students in the Olympia High School Freedom Farmers. They just harvested crops of potatoes, garlic, onions and leeks – crops not likely to be eaten by Capitol Campus deer.

James Wirth, the Garden manager, thinks the Kiwanis Garden and the network of other local growers is the best in the country, based on what he’s learned after years of attending national conferences of similar efforts. Don Leaf says he thinks that is “approximately true.”

“There’s so much goodwill associated with the Garden,” Leaf notes. “You just mention it and it’s an instant invitation to conversation. It’s a place where people can gather and work together. The vegetables are major, but the other part is the community.”

People from every imaginable organization – employee groups from businesses, both big and small; adult and youth sports teams; kids’ programs; service clubs – volunteer. Most come for a day or a few days; others come for years. Some come to pull weeds; others find a special niche, like Nancy Laich, who has been growing all the cabbage starts – 325 per planting – for many years.

Still, the Garden needs more volunteers. Last week when fellow JOLT health care columnist Dr. Debra Glasser and I toured one of the sites, that field of fall and winter squashes was pretty weedy. Those weeds need to be pulled before they go to seed.

In fact, our community needs more of all the Kiwanis Gardens create: fresh, healthy food for people who can’t afford it, a strong ethic of cooperation, and places where diverse people unite around the common cause of caring for the neighbors who need us.

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers, and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com