Mountain View resident and gardener Kim Merry saw a presentation by Nancy Grove at a garden group, though she can’t quite remember which one. In the meeting, she heard the call to donate excess produce from home gardens.
“If you drive around anywhere, you can see all these fruit trees that are just bursting through the ground,” Merry said, describing the potential for donating fresh produce. “Nobody’s eating it.”
Grove co-founded Harvest for Neighbors, an organization that helps connect garden clubs with churches and charitable organizations across Santa Clara and San Mateo counties so they can donate produce to local food pantries. Merry, along with her Cuesta Park neighbors Silvia Eckert, Lin Urborg and others, reached out to other gardeners in the neighborhood to get their own local Harvest for Neighbors group going. They made a subgroup of Cuesta Park’s groups for gardeners and asked who was interested in donating their excess produce.
Eventually, they settled on Sunnyvale-based Reach Potential Movement as their distributor and donated their first produce last June. The women rotate collecting the donated produce in their driveways on the first and third Tuesdays of the month, then drop the goods off at Graham Middle School, where they are distributed to approximately 200 families. At their previous distribution point, Castro Elementary School, they served more than 500 families.
Malia Pires, executive director of Reach Potential Movement, said one in four kids in Santa Clara County faces food insecurity, making their distributions to sites across Mountain View, including at the city’s Safe Parking lot for RVs, critical.
A Stanford University study of families who picked up food discovered that fresh fruits and vegetables are among the most popular items. When the families were asked which items they would want to receive out of five images – dairy, vegetables, fruit, meat and processed items – Pires said, “every interview I sat in on, the families chose fresh fruits and veggies.”
According to Pires, any type of chilis (jalapeño, serrano, etc.) are also popular with the families. This year Eckert started an informal “jalapeño project,” growing the peppers from seeds and donating seedlings so that the people picking up groceries from Graham can take a plant home themselves.
Members of the Cuesta Park Harvest for Neighbors group hope to expand by organizing donation groups throughout Mountain View. Merry said that at the group’s outreach meeting May 1, a resident in Los Altos’ Grant Park area expressed interest in launching a similar effort in her neighborhood.
“We don’t want to be the drop-off point for all of Mountain View because our cars are only so big, and we have had instances where we’re packed – like persimmon time or orange harvesting time,” Merry said.
To volunteer and for more information on Harvest for Neighbors’ Cuesta Park chapter, email [email protected].
For a list of produce drop-off points, visit villageharvest.org/dropoff.
