Growing Through Gardening

Written by Mary Rugg Friday, 18 June 2010 08:47

It’s been a little rough for my small group lately. Like so many others, the economy hit The Mighty Women (our small group) hard and finances are tight everywhere. As we looked around we could see so many others with even bigger problems and we wanted to help, but we wondered how we could be a part of giving when we felt so limited.

When we heard that the Oswego Park District was opening up community garden plots, we knew we had an answer! We decided we would grow as much food as we could on our 20’ by 20’ spot and would give most of it to local food pantries.We split the $20/yr rental of the plot between us and filled out the necessary paperwork. We  attended an Introduction to Gardening class through the Park District (taught by CCC’s very own Jeff Rugg!) where we learned a lot. The garden (located behind South Point School in Southbury Subdivision) is ours from May 1 to December and we plan on keeping something growing all summer and fall. We all watch for good prices on garden plants and have been blessed by quite a few donations from friends and families as they have heard about our project. We are trying to choose things that will produce abundantly. In talking with the folks who run the food pantry we found out that there is never enough fresh vegetables on hand and they run out of everything eventually…even zucchini!

It’s a learning process for us all. We have planted tomatoes, peppers, squash, cucumbers, herbs, corn, cabbage and even okra. We’ve already lost some plants and have replanted and we have room for more. We are coordinating our watering schedule through email (the park district provides water in large storage containers so we just ave to haul it to our garden plot.) We put down barrier cloth which is helping to keep the weeding to a minimum.

As you can see, it doesn’t look like much now but we are having a lot of fun together and we are looking forward to watching how God grows His garden!