Surely, these tomatoes wouldn’t sell for cheap at a farmers market. Just look at this garden.
Worker bees in the form of master gardeners shovel dirt and hay. They walk corridors that divide 42 specially marked rows of plants, each with its own irrigation line.
There might not be a garden in town with this much certified brain power.
But the fruits and vegetables? They’ll be carried out of here for free.
This is the HOPE Garden. Here, the letters HOPE stand for Helping Omaha’s People Eat. That’s exactly what the garden does. Each year, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension’s garden donates four to five tons of produce to a local food pantry.
Every Tuesday and Friday, a truck from Heartland Hope Mission pulls up to the garden at Faithful Shepherd Presbyterian Church, near 165th Avenue and West Center Road. Master gardeners help load the week’s haul, and it’s distributed through the food pantry often that same day.
The garden has been planted so there’s something to harvest every week, and most of the veggies have a long shelf life. Gardeners have asked the pantry: What ethnic foods can we grow? What’s in demand?
“They’ve implemented a lot of those things,” said Kathleen Cue, master gardener program coordinator. Acting on feedback, gardeners planted kale, beets and okra and discontinued spaghetti squash.
HOPE Garden will be featured on this year’s Munroe-Meyer Guild Garden Walk on Sunday. The walk raises money for the Munroe-Meyer Institute, which helps children and adults with disabilities by providing genetic counseling, speech therapy, physical and occupational therapy, developmental pediatrics, behavioral therapy and recreational therapy.
Proceeds help fund early stage research and Munroe-Meyer Institute programs such as Go Baby Go! and the Wheel Club.
Typically, the garden walk includes only residential gardens.
“We thought it would be of interest to people because community gardens, sustainability, farm-to-table and helping others are important issues today,” said Luann Rabe, president of the Munroe-Meyer Guild.
The 1/5-acre garden is managed exclusively by master gardeners, who are certified by Nebraska Extension. This year’s roster includes 20 gardeners, who work a few hours a day once or twice a week from March through October.
The church has provided all the water and land since the garden began in 2004.
“It is a sense of pride,” said the Rev. Nick Dougherty, pastor at the church. “We’re blessed to have a plot of land where we’re able to do something like that.”
In the garden’s first year, it grew only tomatoes and zucchini. Now it provides several dozen varieties of produce, drawing its largest yield, by far, from tomatoes, followed by cucumbers, potatoes and squash. The garden’s size hasn’t changed much since its inception, however.
“To boost production, the impulse is always to make it bigger,” Cue said. “What they did instead is they figured out an intercropping system so that all the site is being used almost all the time. So as one crop ends, the remnants are pulled out and new stuff is put in.”
The garden is funded by grants from Hy-Vee, Farm Credit Service of America and Nebraska Extension’s SNAP-Ed Program. Other companies have helped along the way, including Millard Sprinkler and the Omaha Men’s Garden Club, which worked together to install an irrigation system.
During the past few growing seasons, the garden has added new beds, aronia berry bushes and composting bins. Gardeners also have bolstered the flower garden, which has earned Nebraska Extension’s new pollinator certification.
Master gardeners will be on site during the garden walk to explain some of their techniques, including using newspaper as a weed barrier, rotating crops, reducing pesticide use and tracking the success of the garden’s plants.
“It’s a great demonstration garden to show how people can have a really productive garden in a limited amount of space,” said Ed Leslie, a master gardener who has volunteered at HOPE Garden for the last three years.
For these gardeners, being here means something.
It’s not only a chance to design a well-oiled veggie machine, but it’s a chance to show the good that can come from anywhere — even a patch of dirt behind a church.
“There are a lot of projects around the city you can get involved in,” Leslie said. “I figured if I was going to sweat, I might as well sweat doing some good along the way.”
chris.peters@owh.com, 402-444-1734 twitter.com/_ChrisPeters
More details at: http://www.omaha.com/living/sunday-s-garden-walk-to-feature-community-garden-that-grows/article_e48cc12c-70ab-5c3b-a812-c33c3dfb6778.html