Farm to Market to Table

On Tuesday I volunteered at Growing Hope, a nonprofit farming organization whose main office is in Ypsilanti, Ann Arbor's neighbor.

The office recently moved to an old house which they are renovating through donation funds. It's a pretty neat house with a huge back yard that they've turned into a big garden, hoop house included.

This is Paul, he is the one who told me about the volunteering opportunity:

And here are some of the gardens:

Hoop House

Drive-able Farm

As a volunteer, I helped collect a harvest for the Ypsilanti farmer's market that is held later the same day. We collected a lot of vegetables and even got to sample a few!

There were a lot of other tasty-looking veggies growing on the farm. Here are a few of the (many) pictures I took.

Greens

Peppers

From the Vine

Herbs

Flowers

And a few random ones:

These flowers were pretty enough for their own photo. 

Differential Grasshopper helping with the harvest.

After we were done picking, washing, and packing, we headed to the farmer's market to help them get set up. I met a lot of nice people and had a chance to speak to some of the farmers. I learned that gourds are squashes that look good enough to eat, but should only be used for decoration. Unfortunately, I was so busy that I didn't have time to take too many photos, but here is one taken after we finished a lot of the assembly.

One of my tasks was to make this sign:

Growing Hope has a booth at the farmer's market and where they sell their produce as well as T-shirts and flowers. This is one of their beautiful arrangements:

And finally, after being around fresh produce all morning, all I could think about was salad. I was able to bring home some of the just-picked vegetables and they made a fantastic lunch!

Working in the gardens was a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to doing it again next week. Soon it will be too cold for much growing, so the farmer's market (and hence the harvesting) will only continue through the end of October. Then there are a couple meetings in November and December, but we'll have to see what happens with the snow, and then just hunker down until summer comes again.