Yellow buckets were filled to the top with bright orange carrots and deep-red tomatoes at the Mosaic Community Food Farm and Orchard as volunteers picked a cornucopia of produce during the year-end harvest.
Volunteers from Mosaic Potash, SaskWater, the City of Moose Jaw, the Wakamow Valley Authority and community food agencies descended upon the farm on Sept. 20 to gather all the produce that had been growing since late May.
Once all the vegetables are picked — potentially up to 5,000 pounds — they will be distributed to the three food agencies working in partnership with the food farm: Hunger in Moose Jaw, the Moose Jaw Food Bank, and Riverside Mission.
The garden is located off First Avenue Southeast. The main garden is 0.4 hectares (one acre) in size, while the two orchards total one acre. Last year organizers harvested more than 1,700 pounds of produce.
“This is fantastic,” Deann Little, development manager at the food bank, said about this year’s harvest.
The amount of produce the food bank will receive will help its clients, she continued. It’s not often the organization can offer such fresh produce. Sometimes its hampers are not as nutritious as they should be. What it hands out is enough to put food on people’s tables and to fill their stomachs.
The food bank usually receives potatoes and carrots from the community farm harvest, Little said. One year the organization received so many potatoes that they lasted until Christmas.
The food bank saw a record number of people walk through its doors in August, said Little, which also meant a record number of hampers were distributed.
Many of the people who require a hamper are the working poor, but the organization is seeing more seniors who can’t get by on their pensions. There are also some two-income families coming in, while there are others who live on a fixed income and can’t put enough food on their tables. Therefore, “the garden has a huge impact on what we can make available.”
“This is very exciting,” said Celest Geisbauer, senior community investment specialist with Mosaic Potash. “I was chatting with Mosaic volunteers and they said the farm is even bigger this year. It has grown in the number of plants and the types of plants.”
One reason for the larger bounty of produce is because a fence was installed this year to keep out deer and other unwanted critters, she continued. This made such a difference that Geisbauer thought there would be a 20-per-cent increase in yield this year, which meant more food to the agencies.
“We’re thrilled with that,” she said, adding the one-acre garden also looked impressive visually; last year plants were nibbled down and it was difficult to determine what produce was planted where.
This year does look better, agreed Owen Tillie, a senior summer student with the Wakamow Valley Authority. The gardens received more rain this year than last year, which made everything look greener. Furthermore, the tomato plants produced much more produce this year, compared to last year when the plants curled up and died.
This is Geisbauer’s third year helping with the harvest. She considers this to be one of her most favourite Mosaic projects. She is a big gardener herself, so she enjoys growing vegetables and then picking them. She pointed out being outside is also good for the health.
What makes this project unique, she added, is there are six groups working with Mosaic on this one initiative. That rarely happens on other projects.
