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Posted by Jeffrey Wankel | August 29th, 2011

We’re not just growing vegetables on our rooftops here at Bread for the City. We’re growing gardeners.

Some of our clients have never really seen a garden before, let alone worked in one themselves. Many people, however, have fond memories of gardening in their youth (as part of family and community traditions), but no longer have access to green space these days. For all, our rooftop gardens are an opportunity to learn about food at its source, and to develop some capacity for growing it ourselves.

So in addition to our daily open hours (Monday through Thursday, 9-11am), we’re also conducting gardening workshops to learn and practice together. In these workshops, a mix of staff, volunteers and clients learn how to make their own containers, how to plant them, and facts about different herbs. We learn the science behind the plants and then we our hands dirty. Participants also enjoy lunch prepared with fresh ingredients grown right there in the garden. At the end of the workshops, clients receive both produce and potted plants to take home for their own budding gardens!

Brenden Armstrong, a local professional horticulturist, has been joining us to share best practices and ideas for how to grow vegetables and herbs in containers. Here’s what Brenden says about the class:

During the first class clients had the opportunity to plant basil, tomato, and pepper plants. For the second class they planted more herbs including thyme, oregano, lavender, and mint.

All of these plants were chosen because they are easy to grow both within and outside of the home, and they also provide good yields. Most herbs will supply plenty throughout the year when harvested correctly; basil, for instance, can be harvested every few weeks. Tomatoes and peppers can also be grown easily and grow enough that a couple of plants will suffice for each person in the household.

Throughout the workshops we emphasized the opportunities to use materials around clients’ homes to reduce the costs of gardening. We talked about how you can make everyday items such as yogurt cups and plastic juice jugs into containers for growing vegetables and herbs.
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Posted by Jeffrey Wankel | November 29th, 2010

While this blog normally covers issues directly related to the District, we have recently discovered that dear friends of ours in Virginia are in trouble and need our help. Just a quick moment of your time can literally help save a farm!

Posted by Jeffrey Wankel | September 14th, 2010

Last month, Northwest Current correspondent Teke Wiggen followed Vince Hill, Jeffery Wankel and 30 volunteers into the heat of the fields of Parker Farms in Colonial Beach, Virginia to learn about our Glean for the City program.

Now in its second year, Glean for the City has become an essential part of our food pantry — enabling us to provide free, fresh produce to nearly 5,000 households each month. In fact, it’s been packing our pantry pretty much to the brim — and yet there’s still acres of food left untouched out there. (See our recent photos here.)

So we’re trying to figure out how to rescue even more. That starts by just giving it away more quickly. So now our NW food pantry is putting out a variety of freshly picked produce for anyone to take home–even if they don’t participate in our food program. Seriously, these bins are just set out there, and people can come and pick their fill. All we ask is that they promise to eat what they take — and enjoy.

Since the Northwest Current is only in PDF form, we’re sharing the full text of the article with you below.

Gleaning Crews Aim to Feed the Hungry
By Teke Wiggin, NW Current, August 11 2010

“Go deep!” yells a girl in a white tank top as she chucks three ears of corn in rapid succession toward a man stooped over a crate behind a row of stalks. The man springs upright, deftly grabbing each ear as it hurtles through the air. Laughing to himself, he snaps off the stalk butts and peels the thick outer husks. He begins to drop the ears into a crate lying at his feet but pauses and turns his head toward the girl. “You’re not checking these, Ashley!” he shouts. Ashley shakes her head and prepares to launch another salvo, scooping up ears from the tilled soil and snapping off others from trimmed stalks. On a sweltering Saturday, the two volunteers, along with about 30 others, are scouring Parker Farms cornfields in Oak Grove, Va., to harvest leftover crops for the food-salvaging program known as Glean for the City.

Posted by Jeffrey Wankel | April 26th, 2010

After two successful dry-runs, Client Choice recently went live for an entire week at our Southeast Center, and these experiments have made one thing perfectly clear: our clients love the ability to choose what food they receive from our pantry. This alone makes it a priority for us to implement Client Choice as a permanent feature of our food program.

Permanently instituting Client Choice is going to take time and work. Our average “cycle time” (the total time it takes for a client to receive a bag) is a lean 4 minutes in the regular pantry setup; during the choice experiments our cycle time averaged 6.7 minutes. That’s not bad, but we do want to keep our pantry as efficient as possible — so we intend to tinker with the pantry’s layout, adding new tables that mimic a grocery store experience.

We are also developing a volunteer training module, breaking out everything step-by-step, so that experienced volunteers can easily train first-timers, and staff have the help they need to carry the extra workload.

Posted by Jeffrey Wankel | April 22nd, 2010

Cross-posted from Beyond Bread.

Although we support the environmental objectives of DC’s new bag tax, we also can’t ignore the cumulative effect of a 5 cent per-bag fee on our clients. Clients are already turning to us because they fell short each month — so even seemingly small extra fees do have an impact on them.

This also means that Bread for the City can be a critical gateway point for efforts to mitigate the regressive effect of this law. So we are pleased to report that since the passage of the Bag Bill, Bread for the City has received more than 8,000 reusable bags to distribute to our clients.

We are keeping track of every bag we hand out, and encouraging clients to bring back their bag next time. Early indications suggest that our clients are adapting quickly. Clients are already coming back with our reusable bags in hand, as well as others that they’ve received elsewhere.

So a special thanks goes out to these large donors: D.D.O.E. (5,500 bags), Whole Foods (2,000 bags), Giant (200 bags), and Target (100 bags).

As impressive as 8,000 bags sounds, it leaves us far from our goal of one reusable bag provided to each client. Even before the passage of the law, however, Safeway pledged to donate a large amount of reusable bags. By fulfilling its pledge, Safeway would put us considerably farther along down the path to a bag per client.

While we wait for Safeway to come through, we’re continuing to search for more bags for our clients. That’s why we are kicking off a reusable bag campaign: now you can help!

Posted by Jeffrey Wankel | March 17th, 2010

We recently took the first step in an exciting new direction for our food pantry: opening up our menu so that clients can choose which foods they receive.

Read the full post Posted in Access, Organizations