Just Good Food 2021 Wrap Up
The Colorado Farm and Food Alliance’s Just Good Food campaign is wrapping up its second successful year of sharing, growing food for those in need, and offering support for local gardeners and new farmers! This season we encouraged local participatory food sharing through our Plant-A-Row project and our garden, expanded our gleaning efforts with a new partnership, and kicked off a fundraising campaign to build out the facility at our Equity Garden Incubator Plot. It’s been a full year and we are so grateful to everyone who has grown with us and offered support through volunteer hours, donations, and enthusiasm for our work.
You can help us NOW by making a contribution before December 15 to help us meet our SeedMoney.org matching grant! Details follow this update.
Plant-A-Row and Gleaning
Our Just Good Food campaign started in 2020 initially as a response to support food security during the pandemic. The Plant-A-Row project was central to that effort, and for 2021 remained a model of community sharing to address issues of waste and food access.
Participants are offered free plant starts and gardening consultation in exchange for a commitment to donate extra produce from their gardens to our regional food sharing network. This summer we served four local food pantries on a weekly basis, in addition to local nonprofits like The Learning Council and Kids’ Pasta Project. With the help of our gracious growers, we donated 500 lbs of fresh produce to area food sharing programs in 2021.
We also expanded our gleaning capacities in 2021. We have partnered with the Colorado organization, UpRoot and their Delta County Gleaning Coordinator, Abbey Anderson, to bring more gleans-and capture more food-in the valley. We have donated over 3,000 lbs of apples through gleans this year and Abbey has begun to work with vegetable farms to capture even more food that would otherwise go to waste!
This food will now go into local and regional food sharing programs and gleaning participants get to take some home too. It is really wonderful to see overlap and increased capacities by working with like-minded organizations and individuals. We strive to create more creativity and camaraderie in all of our work.
Equity Garden Incubator Plot
The evening of the first frost of the season, Just Good Food kicked off its fundraising campaign to further develop the site of our Equity Garden Incubator Plot with a timber frame classroom, outdoor horno kitchen, pollinator gardens and pathways. The design will feature two raised planting beds to create an inviting, accommodating and accessible community gardening space.
The hub of our Just Good Food work in 2021 was focused at the site we are developing for our Equity Garden Incubator Plot. We donated 275 lbs of produce to local food pantries from our Equity Garden and we also hosted 4 workshops at this location, including working with pollinators, building healthy compost, waterwise irrigation design, and natural Korean fermentation techniques.
Much of the harvesting, soil health and planting at our Equity Garden was done with volunteer help at our weekly volunteer days. This season we spread 15 yards of compost with volunteer help, experimented with natural weed suppressants and planted a spring and fall cycle of cover crops for soil health. We have been working with the property owners to incorporate holistic management and rotational grazing with sheep and cows to keep the soil rich and healthy when it is fallow. The ruminants have been hard at work mowing the cover crops and producing layers of fertility for future farmers to come.
On October 14th, as a chilly night wrapped the valley in clouds and brought our first frost, sixty people found warmth and gathered to celebrate the bounty of a summer’s end harvest. Prepared by the Forage Sisters, with top quality local ingredients from a dozen North Fork Valley farms and ranches, Qutori Wines contributed phenomenal wine pairings with each course to this local food feast. This evening also raised more than one-third of our goal to complete the first phase of our site build-out. It was a lovely evening of feasting and generosity, and we are truly grateful to all who came and contributed. Lookout for next year’s event - you won’t want to miss it!
Overall, we’ve had another successful and humbling year thanks to our incredible community and tremendous volunteer support that has allowed us to get good food to people experiencing food insecurity, and to also do SO much more. Your enthuthiasm for our work makes us so excited to continue on into 2022, but we won’t go completely dark until then, so keep an eye out for more learning opportunities this Winter.
Thank you all so much for your ongoing support. We cannot do this work without you!
Match your donation through December 15!
If you donate at this link before December 15 you will help us get a matching grant from SeedMoney.org