Cara #1

The High Plains Food Bank is well known for their can drives, but did you know that they also have a large garden that contributes to their food production? I will spend my summer as an intern in this garden with Marc Jansing and Morgan Dezendorf of the food bank. Marc and Morgan have created quite a garden which contributed over 20,000 pounds of produce to the food bank last year! But they didn't achieve this by themselves. Volunteers are crucial to the garden's success. They not only help increase production numbers, but their participation encourages others in the community to share in the education and awareness of something that many in the nation have become far removed from, the ability to cultivate your own produce. With effort and education, we can all produce delicious, fresh foods that can virtually go straight from our yards to our plates, and the food bank garden is the perfect place to learn these process for yourself while helping to provide nutritionally valuable food for others. You can learn to compost, weed, trellis, plant from seed or seedling, identify beneficial and harmful pests all while getting to spend some time outside getting a tan and making a positive influence in your community. The garden is a resource for food production and education, and its free. Workshops are offered in the garden on a variety of topics. Last year the topics ranged from staring a garden to cooking classes, and this year there will be so many more! I have learned so much in the short amount of time I have been there and I am looking forward to the many other things there are to learn and what I personally will be contributing to my community as a result.

Something fun and interesting I learned about this week is melon sprouts. We planted radish seeds a couple weeks ago and have been monitoring the beds for their sprouts. The radishes are starting to show and so have melon sprouts. But we didn't plant melons, so where did these sprouts come from? They came from the compost which included last years unusable melons! To keep room for the radishes we have to pluck the melon sprouts out. Marc plucked one out and handed it to me telling me that I could eat it. They are delicious and taste just like an actual melon does. I was thinking that maybe we could try adding these sprouts to salads and if there were enough, putting them into the food bank rotation. I wonder what the kids in kids cafe would think about having those in a salad. Or even on ice cream! It might take a little convincing, but maybe I could try some test trials on kids that I know! Have any of you tried melon sprouts or do any of you have any recipes that include them?