What happens when your real job gets in the way of farming your summers away? You find a way to farm where you are. And that’s just what Anna and Jesse, a young local couple in the Twin Cities are doing with a new venture this summer.
Look at those smiles!
The couple caught my attention because they are farming with the sole purpose of giving all the food to a local food shelf! So, I decided to tag along and lend my mini-muscles to the ‘groundbreaking’ of their newly acquired plot off Marshall and Snelling, nestled up to a parking lot.
My Experience
It was fun, hard work. And I couldn’t stop smiling afterwards. With 5 of us digging in, we prepped about 250 feet row of beds for an early crop of green onions to be followed by collard greens. The other plot will grow radishes, turnips, carrots, baby bok choy and tomatoes with some lettuce stuck into any available holes.
Getting Started
These two have a passion for growing food, and have been figuring out h ow to lend that passion to serve the community. In the spring of 2016, when a call was put out to the Woodland Hills Church community for help planting a garden, the couple answered. During its first season, these two helped build six raised bed gardens outside of the church with the purpose of adding fresh produce to the Merrick Services food shelf housed within the church’s walls.
The gardens produced a small but impactful amount of food that was donated last growing season. “Since we enjoy growing food at a scale that far exceeds what we can consume ourselves, we ended up donating produce from our personal gardens as well. In continued response to what we feel is a calling, we decided to challenge ourselves to dedicate all this year’s growing power and space to produce food for Merrick”, says Anna. Turns out, that’s a lot of growing power!
Digging in, by hand, with big hearts.
