The next work party to get the St. Peter’s Fellowship Farm communal garden ready for planting later this month takes place from 2-4 p.m. on Saturday, May 1. St. Peter’s Fellowship Farm is located behind the See House behind St. Peter’s By The Sea Episcopal Church on Lincoln Street. Tools and gloves will be provided.
Food grown at the St. Peter’s Fellowship Farm communal garden is sold at the Sitka Farmers Markets, which take place on alternate Saturdays starting on July 17. For more information about the May 1 work party, contact Doug Osborne at 747-3752 or doug_las@att.net, or contact Lisa Sadleir-Hart at 747-5985 or 3akharts@acsalaska.net.
Planting parties at St. Peter’s Fellowship Farm take place from 2-4 p.m. on three straight Saturdays in mid-May — May 15, 22 and 29 — safely after the last frost of the spring. For more information on the planting parties, contact Lisa Sadleir-Hart at 747-5985 or 3akharts@acsalaska.net.
Tracy Sylvester (left) and Jesse Remund staff the Endless Summer Ecological Garden and Landscape information booth at Let's Grow Sitka on March 14, 2010
Jesse Remund and Tracy Sylvester are offering a new service to Sitka with their Endless Summer Ecological Garden and Landscape company.
Jesse and Tracy say they can help Sitka gardeners take local food to a new level. They will help local gardeners grow vegetables, herbs and medicinal plants by providing expertise and grunt labor. They introduced their new service at the “Let’s Grow Sitka!” garden show event on March 14 at Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall.
The pair will help Sitka residents with garden and landscape planning, planting, growing and maintenance, and harvesting. They believe, “A smart landscape is not only beautiful, it conserves water and energy, creates habitat for birds and other living organisms, filters pollution, combats global warming and can even provide tasty food for your plate!”
To learn more about their service, call 738-5377 or e-mail EndlessSummerEcological@gmail.com. Rates will depend on the job. Their main focus is on vegetable gardens.
It’s spring again and time to start planning for our third year of Sitka Farmers Markets. This year, the markets are scheduled for 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. on alternate Saturdays, July 17 and 31, Aug. 14 and 28, and Sept. 11, at the Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall.
We really, really, need more locally grown produce vendors, home bakers, prepared food vendors and volunteers this year. If you know of someone who can help, please let us know. If you have extra locally grown produce but don’t have the time to staff a booth, you can donate it or sell it to the Sitka Farmers Market for resale at the Sitka Farmers Market booth. Proceeds from the produce sold at the Sitka Farmers Market booth goes toward Sitka Local Foods Network projects.
This year we had to raise the vendor fee for a table to $15 to cover costs of renting the ANB Hall and kitchen, hiring musicians and other expenses. There is an option to get your vendor space free if you help out with set-up and clean-up.
The registration form and market rules are linked below as PDF files. If you have any questions, please contact Linda Wilson at 747-3096 (nights and weekends only) or by e-mail at lawilson87@hotmail.com.
Help support the Sitka Local Foods Network by purchasing organic seed varieties from Bountiful Gardens seed company that have been specially selected for our challenging climate by longtime Sitka gardener Jamie Chevalier.
There will be a serve-yourself seed rack at Old Harbor Books, with an honor-system donation jar for making change next to the seeds.
Among the seed varieties available will be cabbage, broccoli, beets, carrots, a variety of greens mixes, kale, lettuces, peas, radishes and summer squash. Seed supplies are limited for first come, first served.
Bountiful Gardens is an educational nonprofit organization that specializes in heirloom, untreated and open-pollinated varieties of seeds for sustainable agriculture. Bountiful Gardens also promotes the GROW BIOINTENSIVE sustainable mini-farming concept, which helps gardeners make small plots of land productive sources for agriculture.
For more information, contact Kerry MacLane at 752-0654.
Several volunteers helped out at a work party on Saturday afternoon, April 17, to get the St. Peter’s Fellowship Farm communal garden ready for planting next month.
The volunteers pulled weeds, mixed kelp and compost into the soil, built a couple of new garden beds, painted some new planters, transplanted some strawberries, cleaned out the storage shed and performed a lot of the tasks needed to get a garden ready for planting. In addition to the slideshow above, click here and scroll down for a similar slideshow on our Shutterfly site.
The next work party takes place from 2-4 p.m. on Saturday, May 1. St. Peter’s Fellowship Farm is located behind the See House behind St. Peter’s By The Sea Episcopal Church on Lincoln Street. Tools and gloves will be provided.
Food grown at the St. Peter’s Fellowship Farm communal garden is sold at the Sitka Farmers Markets, which start on July 17. For more information about the May 1 work party, contact Doug Osborne at 747-3752 or doug_las@att.net, or contact Lisa Sadleir-Hart at 747-5985 or 3akharts@acsalaska.net.
Planting parties at St. Peter’s Fellowship Farm take place from 2-4 p.m. on three straight Saturdays in mid-May — May 15, 22 and 29 — safely after the last frost of the spring. For more information on the planting parties, contact Lisa Sadleir-Hart at 747-5985 or 3akharts@acsalaska.net.
Also, a work party is scheduled for 12:30-3 p.m. on Saturday, April 24, at Seaview Gardens, a garden at 3509 Halibut Point Road owned by Sitka Local Foods Network secretary/treasurer Linda Wilson that also provides produce sold at the Sitka Farmers Markets. This work party will start off with homemade pizza, then volunteers will help Linda prepare new garden beds for planting so we have more produce to sell at the Sitka Farmers Markets. For more information on this work party, contact Linda at 747-3096 (evenings and weekends only) or send her an e-mail at lawilson87@hotmail.com.
Click here to read the current Sitka Local Foods Network e-newsletter courtesy of Linda Wilson. Don’t forget, you can sign up for the e-newsletter by typing your e-mail address in the “Join Our Mailing List” box on bottom of the left side of the page.
This issue of the e-newsletter includes information about April being National Garden Month, about local garden work parties for gardens that help supply the Sitka Farmers Market with vegetables, growing apple trees in Sitka and growing rhubarb.
Local gardener Evening Star Grutter of Eve's Farm, shown here with some of her homemade jams during the Aug. 29, 2009, Sitka Farmers Market, will be the guest speaker at April's meeting of the Sitka Gardeners Club
The Sitka Gardeners Club’s monthly get-together takes place from 7-8:30 p.m. on Tuesday, April 20, in Room 106 at the University of Alaska Southeast-Sitka Campus on Japonski Island.
The get-together provides a venue for gardeners of all types, interests and skills to informally exchange ideas, information, seeds and growing tips. Share and learn from other gardeners with no dues or commitments other than good fellowship.
Sitka gardeners plan to meet on the third Tuesday of the month at the UAS-Sitka Campus. This month’s meeting will feature gardening tips from Evening Star Grutter of Eve’s Farm, and it is sponsored by UAS-Sitka Campus and the University of Alaska Fairbanks Cooperative Extension Service. For more information, call Cheryl Stromme at 747-9473 or Bob Gorman at 747-9413.
As you start to plan your garden for this spring and summer, don’t forget to Plant A Row For The Hungry. The Plant A Row For The Hungry program (also known as Plant A Row or PAR) is a national campaign by the Garden Writers Association of America that got its start in Alaska.
In the cold winter of 1994, Anchorage Daily News garden columnist and former Garden Writers Association of America President Jeff Lowenfels was returning to his hotel after a Washington, D.C., event when he was approached by a homeless person who asked for some money to buy food. Lowenfels said Washington, D.C., had signs saying, “Don’t give money to panhandlers,” so he shook his head and kept on walking. But the man’s reply, “I really am homeless and I really am hungry. You can come with me and watch me eat,” stayed with Lowenfels for the rest of his trip.
Jeff Lowenfels
The encounter continued to bother Lowenfels, even as he was flying back to Anchorage. During the flight, Lowenfels came up with an idea when he started writing his weekly garden column (the longest continuously running garden column in the country, with no missed weeks since it started on Nov. 13, 1976). He asked his readers to plant one extra row in their gardens to grow food to donate to Bean’s Café, an Anchorage soup kitchen. The idea took off.
When Anchorage hosted the Garden Writers Association of America convention in 1995, Lowenfels took the GWAA members to Bean’s Café to learn about the Plant A Row For Bean’s Café program. The Garden Writers Association of America liked the idea, and it became the national Plant A Row For The Hungry campaign. In 2002, the Garden Writers Association Foundation was created as a national 501(c)(3) nonprofit to manage the Plant A Row For The Hungry program.
“I am not surprised by the growth of PAR,” Lowenfels wrote in an e-mail to the Sitka Local Foods Network. “It is now in all 50 states and across Canada and there are thousands of variations of the original program — from prison gardens for the hungry to botanical gardens donating their produce from public display gardens. This is because gardeners always share information and extra food, so the idea was a natural.”
It took five years for the program to reach its first million pounds of donated food, but the second million only took two years and the next eight years saw a million pounds of donated food (or more) each year. Since 1995, more than 14 million pounds of food have been donated. Not only that, the program is getting ready to expand overseas to Australia, England and other countries with avid gardeners.
“We have supplied something in the vicinity of enough food for 50 million meals,” Lowenfels wrote in his e-mail. “Gardeners can solve this hunger problem without the government. And we don’t need a tea party to do it! Or chemicals, I might add, as author of a book on organic gardening (Teaming With Microbes, written with Wayne Lewis)!”
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, one out of every eight U.S. households experiences hunger or the risk of hunger. Many people skip meals or eat too little, sometimes going an entire day or more without food. About 33 million Americans, including 13 million children, have substandard diets or must resort to seeking emergency food because they can’t always afford to buy the food they need. In recent years the demand for hunger assistance has increased 70 percent, and research shows that hundreds of children and adults are turned away from food banks each year because of lack of resources.
While many people credit Lowenfels for creating the Plant A Row For The Hungry program, Lowenfels says the real heroes are the gardeners growing the extra food and donating it to local soup kitchens, senior programs, schools, homeless shelters and neighbors. You can hear him pass along the credit to all gardeners at the end of this interview last year with an Oklahoma television station (video also embedded below).
“One row. That’s all it takes. No rules other than the food goes to the hungry. You pick the drop-off spot or just give it to a needy friend or neighbor. Nothing slips between the lip and the cup, I say,” Lowenfels wrote in his e-mail.
For people wanting to Plant A Row For The Hungry in Sitka, there are several places that would love to help distribute some fresh locally grown veggies or berries to those who are less fortunate, such as the Salvation Army (note, the current officers are Capts. Kevin and Tina Bottjen), Sitkans Against Family Violence (SAFV), local churches, Sitka Tribe of Alaska and other organizations. The food the Sitka Local Foods Network grows at St. Peter’s Fellowship Farm communal garden goes to the Sitka Farmers Market, where people who are in the WIC (Women, Infants, Children)supplemental food program can use special farmers market vouchers to buy fresh vegetables.
The Sitka Local Foods Network also takes donations of local produce to sell at the Sitka Farmers Markets, and all proceeds from the Sitka Farmers Markets are used to help pay for Sitka Local Foods Network projects geared toward helping more people in Sitka grow and harvest local food. For more information, contact Sitka Farmers Market coordinators Linda Wilson (lawilson87@hotmail.com) or Kerry MacLane (maclanekerry@yahoo.com).
Renee Pierce, right, explains the first Sitka CSA venture to Sitka Local Foods Network board member Natalie Sattler during the Let's Grow Sitka! event on March 14
One of the latest trends in farming is Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), which enables people to buy local, seasonal food directly from the farmer. Renee and Brian Pierce, who own the locally made kelp products and wild berry jelly shop Simple Pleasures of Alaska, are working with Sitka growers to start a small CSA venture with local produce during the summer growing season.
Renee Pierce said that instead of the CSA being a true farmers’ cooperative, she will buy produce from several local growers — including Florence Welsh of the Welsh Family Forget-Me-Not Gardens, Hope Merritt of Gimbal Botanicals, Judy Johnstone of Sprucecot Gardens, Evening Star and Fabian Grutter of Eve’s Farm, and Lori Adams of Down To Earth U-Pick Gardens. The CSA also will include produce from the Pierce Family’s Simple Pleasures garden.
The Sitka CSA will start small, with membership slots for just 25 families the first year. Renee Pierce said of those 25 slots, only about 10 memberships are left. CSA members will commit to paying $50 plus tax every other week, which will give the member families a selection of produce that includes some organic produce purchased from Organically Grown Company of Portland, Ore. During the months when Sitka growers aren’t producing many vegetables, there will be more produce purchased from Organically Grown Company. There also will be an option to buy bread at $6 a loaf beyond the price of the produce box.
The produce selection includes many crops that can be grown in Sitka — such as blueberries, strawberries, raspberries, potatoes, radishes, zucchini, green beans, beets, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, broccoli, greens, tomatoes, etc. But with the Organically Grown Company providing some of the produce, CSA members also can choose items that aren’t regular Sitka crops — such as bananas, lemons, limes, pineapples, oranges, etc.
Information about Sitka's first CSA from the Let's Grow Sitka! event on March 14
Renee Pierce said she has worked with Organically Grown Company for about four years, purchasing organic produce for the Pierce family and several friends and other Sitka residents who heard about the venture (at one point she had about 60-70 families buying from her). She said she orders produce by the case, and it is available for pick-up from 3-6 p.m. every other Monday afternoon at the Simple Pleasures store next to Kettleson Memorial Library. The first pick-up day for the Sitka CSA is March 29 (which will be for the 15 or so families that already have reserved a spot in the CSA), and the next pick-up day is April 12. CSA members are encouraged to bring their own bags and/or boxes on pick-up days.
The pick-up days are slated to be during the weeks between the every-other-week Sitka Farmers Markets this summer, which will give local growers and buyers the opportunity to buy and sell local produce for both. Renee said there will be some produce extras for families that want to adjust their allotments, but everybody’s allotted produce value will be $50. If you add from the extras you will need to pay the difference, and if you give up some produce you don’t want so your value dips below $50 there are no refunds. She said the CSA is being done as a community service and it’s meant to just break even so the bills get paid.
To learn more about the Sitka CSA, contact Renee Pierce at 738-0044 (cell) or 747-3814 (home). You also can e-mail her at mpierce@ptialaska.net.
Click here to read the current Sitka Local Foods Network e-newsletter courtesy of Linda Wilson. Don’t forget, you can sign up for the e-newsletter by typing your e-mail address in the “Join Our Mailing List” box on bottom of the left side of the page.
Sitka Local Foods Network 
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