Plant A Row for a Food Bank in Your Neighborhood

 With gas and food prices soaring and stagnant wages and lost jobs everyone is feeling the pinch from the economy these days. And there is one frightening indicator that needs attention from our many gardening customers. Working families make up 41% of those receiving food stamps, a 30% rise from just a decade ago. So even families with one or two jobs can’t afford enough food to get through the week. There are even more families that don’t qualify for food stamps that visit food banks regularly. Second Harvest, the nation’s largest network of food banks, says demand is up an average of 15% to 20% from a year ago. More than 80% of its food banks reported that they could not meet demand without trimming operations or reducing the amount of food given out.

 We at Dirt Works are asking all of our customers out there that are fortunate enough to have a garden plot to Plant A Row for their local food bank. Most of us love gardening so much that we tend to over do it and end up with more produce than our families and friends can eat. It would make a huge difference at your local food bank if you gave all those extra veggies to them instead of letting them go bad. In the past year, the demand for hunger assistance has increased by 40%, and research shows that hundreds of hungry children and adults are turned away from food banks each year because of lack of resources.

 For more information on this program please visit http://www.gardenwriters.org/Par/Donation.html

 To see a brief report about food bank shortages on the PBS show Bill Moyer’s Journal click here http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04112008/watch.html

 Here is a handy zip code locator for local food banks http://www.secondharvest.org/zip_code.jsp

 If all of our customers planted a few extra plants for the food banks it would make a tremendous difference without much extra effort or money. The quality of your donation will far outweigh the nutritional value of traditional can drives. Please write us and tell us about your experience with Plant A Row and we may include your story in a future newsletter update.

Many things grow in the garden that were never sown there. 

~Thomas Fuller, Gnomologia, 1732