Food For Thought (FFT) will host its first plant sale in its parking lot at 6550 Railroad Avenue in Forestville on April 24 and April 25 to raise funds towards the nonprofit’s efforts to provide meals to thousands living with major illnesses
The plant sale runs from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., offering starts for organic heirloom vegetables “including tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, summer and winter squash, eggplant, tomatillos, bush and pole beans, lettuces, kale, basil, corn, sunflowers, zinnias, cosmos and perennials,” a press release from FFT said.
Garden Manager Sorrel Allen said the food bank is also potting its own strawberries and herbs from its surrounding garden that visitors can take a tour of at the plant sale. She said the food bank tries to grow unique foods that tend to be expensive and aren’t often donated, like asparagus and blueberries.
Allen said the plant sale is the food bank’s first fundraiser of the kind and flourished as a community-based endeavor. “It’s a bit of a patchwork quilt,” she said, an idea that came from FFT’s volunteers.
Because FFT does not have a greenhouse, “we put a call out to our community to see if anybody wanted to volunteer their basically green thumbs and greenhouses and grow a specific crop for us, and to let us know how much they could grow,” she said.
Thirteen people volunteered to grow flats of plants with varying levels of expertise and space, Allen said. Two more community members opened up their greenhouses to water and tend plants until the fundraiser, she said, and one volunteer grew squashes in her living room.
All of the plants for the sale are now growing in the volunteered greenhouses, she said. FFT had prepared to apply for a grant for its own greenhouse last year, but when COVID-19 hit, all funds went to maintaining the food bank’s operations, Allen said.
“So, I’ve just been there as a resource to people,” she said. “They (came) to me with lots of questions throughout the process and even sending me pictures, like ‘Here’s what our cucumbers look like over here.’ So, it’s been, like I said, a bit of a patchwork quilt but it’s kind of cool that the community’s all come to make it possible.”
