EDIBLEharvt
Local Gardeners Share Their Surplus Harvest Photo by Cat Kahn.
By Anastazja Kolodziej As the coronavirus epidemic forced schools, businesses, and nonessential activities to shut down in March, Cat Kahn found herself the new owner of 400 one-month-old plants. Kahn, a Montgomery County Master Gardener, volunteers through a University of Maryland Extension program to teach Manna Food Center recipients to grow their own food in a bucket or grow bag. Because they used plants grown from seed, the Master Gardeners first planted these at a local high school to develop before the official start of the program in May. When Montgomery County Public Schools closed in the middle of March, they informed the program that the horticulture teacher at the school was not allowed to continue traveling to the school to water the plants, Kahn said. “She took them home and said, ‘Now, what do you want to do with them? They’re your plants,’” Kahn said. “So I came up with this idea that, maybe since University of Maryland Master 20
WASHINGTON GARDENER
JUNE 2020
Gardeners weren’t participating in education programs with the community, they would like to adopt this project, and we could all pool our resources, take these plants, and grow them to donate back to the community.” Kahn approached the Master Gardener organization with the idea of growing the plants to donate to food pantries, she said. But when they denied the proposal, Kahn took it into her own hands by creating HarvestShare. “Most of May I spent driving around picking up plants and redistributing them to anyone who said, ‘I think I have some extra space. I’ll take some plants,’” Kahn said. Although only about 250 plants remained from the initial 400 from being moved so many times, she said she managed to gather 200 more plants from various seed starters throughout the county to give away for the program. As Kahn was searching for people who would be interested in participating in the project, she reached out to
Michelle Nelson, program manager of Montgomery County community gardens. “She felt that the community garden program would be a really good place to potentially recruit some growers, but also a place where there might already be some excess produce that could potentially be donated or circulated to populations that may be more foodinsecure right now,” Nelson said. The community garden program has 22 volunteers across all 11 gardens, Nelson said, who are helping coordinate the effort by finding new people to participate in HarvestShare. About 50 people are currently participating in the program, said Kahn. One participant, Sue Kuklewicz, was volunteering to teach kids to grow their own food through the Master Gardeners’ Growing Forward program when the pandemic forced it to shut down. Because it was only officially canceled for the spring, Kuklewicz said she and other Master Gardeners in the area
