Author: Jamie Dockery
Planning Unit: Fayette County CES
Major Program: Local Food Systems
Plan of Work: Making healthy Lifestyle Choices and Citizen Education
Outcome: Intermediate Outcome
The pandemic has dramatically increased food insecurity in our community. In order to offset some of these impacts we shifted our Extension office demonstration gardens to production mode. We have a small percentage of our Extension Master Gardeners who wanted to volunteer in a safe outdoor capacity. Our gardens became the focus of these efforts. Since mid-March this dedicated group has worked tirelesly to ensure maximum production. They have continually followed harvested crops with successive plantings of vegetables to ensure a constant supply. Large quantities of varied produce are taken to local food pantries for donation each week. This approach has proven a winning combination with our shift to virtual gardening classes. We have used the garden for filming lots of vegtable production videos to support our clients who want to try growing at home. Our donated produce has amounted to just over 1400 lbs for the season thus far with many more crops to be harvested in the next month. Adequate rainfall and a production focus have resulted in one of the gardens most bountiful years we have seen. We are excited we were able to shift our focus to offer these opportunities to our community.
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