Food Bank

We started volunteering at the Oregon Food Bank Eastside Learning Garden again now that school is out for the summer.  Julia spent some time harvesting beets.  These are the biggest of those she harvested. 

The kids also harvested rainbow swiss chard.  I wish I would have taken a picture of it when it was NOT shoved into a bucket or box.  The stems were all different colors (red, orange, yellow, green, white); thus the use of the word "rainbow".  It would have made a beautiful salad.  I wouldn't know for sure because Jourdan ate the leaves we brought home before we even made it across the river.

The best part of the day is packing up all the harvest and weighing it.  This is only a small portion of what was harvested that day.  We needed to make several trips with the wagon because we picked so much produce.  In total, we harvested 102 pounds of beets and 80+ pounds of rainbow swiss chard. 

We got our picture taken for the Oregon Food Bank newsletter.  On this day, we took my teacher friend Gina with us (she's standing right behind me).  That's most, but not all, of the chard we harvested in front of us. 

Although my own garden suffers because we put all our gardening energy into the food bank.  It's for a good cause, and we get to do the fun part of gardening - harvesting.  We've been back a few times since and harvested more beets, chard, strawberries, and beans.