Thank you Home Depot of Omak, WA, for the following contributions:

- Donating materials for 10 raised bed gardens to distribute to low income families in Okanogan County.
- Assembling the aforementioned beds.
- and donating a $1,400.00 Gift card to pay for additional needs associated with the Square Foot Garden Outreach Project.


Because of your support, ten low-income families will gain experience gardening, and hopefully continue to do so the rest of their lives. OCCAC is trying to make these experiences positive, so as to encourage continued growth, but without the assistance of the community, there is no community action.

Thank you Home Depot, for making this project possible.

P.S.

Yesterday, two people came to the gate while Kyle was working in the garden, and walked away with packets of seeds. If you, or someone you know would like to experience this phenomenon, try stopping by the garden during the week. If you see the gate open, chances are somebody would love to talk with you about what's happening in your garden this season.

Food For All Garden  May '8th 2012:

The photos above are our Hay Bale Experiments. The idea is to plant directly in the Hay Bale, and see if it is possible to grow while the bale decomposes. If you look at the second picture, you can see the White Clover seeds that were sown to fix nitrogen in the bales, as well as some fungi that were dormant in the bale, and came up when we started to water.

The process is exciting, and i with a little more time, and a bit of compost, we  hope these bales will be ready for vegetables.

SPEAKING OF COMPOST!

Kyle built these bins yesterday out of pallets and scrap wood, and now OCCAC has a tumbler and an on-site bin; this is exciting because that means we can begin to compost our own waste here at the food bank. Compost is so vital, and recent surveys indicate that people are not doing so because it is smelly.

SOLUTION:

Layer that compost up with brown materials and green materials so oxygen can get to everything. Probably the worst composting practice in the world is that primordial soupy, anaerobic mess that was forgotten about at the bottom of the trash bin, and smelled so awful somebody vowed never to compost again. ---Please try again, and if you haven't tried yet, please try. Compost is amazing. If you want to talk decomposition, and you can chat with Kyle about worms.

Square Foot Gardening:

An introductory method of growing intense amounts of vegetables in  a raised bed.

How much can you grow in 16 sq ft?

Have a good day.

2012 Begins

The Food For All program continues! We have been slow to get to the blog for a while as we are working very hard to prepare for the 2012 growing season. You may see a new face at Community Action, Kyle Jacobs is our new AmeriCorps VISTA Volunteer through Harvest Against Hunger; he will be working on the gleaning program in 2012. We are starting our Gleaning, Gardening, Growing Together project which has been funded primarily by the Wal-Mart Giving Foundation. This project will continue the work of PLANT which we had huge success with. We were able to meet and surpass our goals. We planned to glean 20,000 lbs of fresh produce and we gleaned 52,986lbs. We planned to increase the fruit and vegetable consumption of the 10 families who received gardens by 2 servings and we increased their intake on average 2.91 servings a day. We planned to raise the fruit and vegetable consumption of food bank clients by 1 serving daily and were able to increase their intake by 2.89 servings a day from gleaned produce. A large thanks goes out to Sara Gerlitz our 2011 VISTA Volunteer as well as our local community volunteers. This would not have been possible without you. Keep your eyes open for updates on our Gleaning, Gardening, Growing Together project.

End-of-Season Social 11/9

Greetings Folks!

Community Action is thrilled with the support we've had this year as our "Food For All" program has grown and exceeded expectations with high yields of produce, great volunteer turnout and recruitment.

We want to thank our volunteers and have a "get-together" this coming Wednesday the 9th at the Okanogan Grange. From 4-5:30pm swing by and socialize with donors, volunteers and the Community Action Food & Nutrition Department. Desserts, coffee and warm drinks provided. Awards, gifts and honors too!

If you volunteered your time or donated your produce please come by, we want to honor your hard work and dedication in providing fresh local produce to our food banks this season. Without your efforts the wide array of nutritious fruits and vegetables wouldn't be available for our clients. It is also the last week for our AmeriCorps VISTA, Sara Gerlitz. We hope to see you and if not see you next year!

Exceeding Expectations

So far this month we're exceeding our expectations in the gleaning department of Community Action's "Food For All". With a total of 25,094 pounds of fresh fruits and vegetables gleaned this year, we've blown our 2010 totals out of the water!

Last year "Food For All" gleaned 18,540 pounds of produce. Our inaugural year we started with around eight thousand pounds, mostly generated from our on-site demonstration garden and late season gleans.

Another 4500 pounds of apples are expected to come in this week thanks to local grower Buster Carter. This Okanogan Mason is donating 10 bins of red delicious apples to our distribution center. We will house the fruit in recently donated cold storage space at the Magi facility located just a few blocks from Community Action. This donation will tip us onto the cusp of 30,000 total pounds! The Okanogan Masons donated a substantial amount of apples last year and donate directly to the Omak food bank as well.

November and December are right around the bend and "Food For All" hopes to double last year's total. As a community, thanks to our agricultural based economy, gleaning is still possible in the off-season. To help us distribute this bounty out to our network of eight food banks we are looking for volunteers to come to our warehouse to help pack apples for our end of the month distributions. Our program is also in need of quality fruit boxes. So, if you're interested in helping extend the harvest season, "Food For All" has several avenues for you to take action. You can contact the "Food For All" Representative and gleaning coordinator at 509-422-4041 or 509-833-0336.