Community Garden Hits ‘Ton for Hunger’ Goal

The Dunwoody Community Garden is celebrating its second birthday on Tuesday of this week, but that’s not the only milestone the 67 members are cheering.

Team Food Pantry, one of the Community Gardens16 volunteer teams, has reached its goal of a “Ton for Hunger” – harvesting 2,083 pounds of locally grown organic produce for charity so far this year.

A pear gleaning on Saturday at the home of Dan Davis in the Spalding Chase subdivision in Sandy Springs just across the Dunwoody City line pushed Team Food Pantry over its 2,000-pound goal for the first time since the garden was founded Aug. 23, 2009.

The harvest, which was weighed Sunday evening just before a members meeting to elect new officers and a pot luck dinner at the Community Garden in Brook Run Park, tipped the scales at 224 pounds. Based on an average of $5 a pound, the total value of this year’s harvests, with four months left on the calendar, stands at $10,415.

Reaching the “Ton for Hunger” goal was a dream-come-true for Team Food Pantry and the garden’s members. It was especially sweet for the founding members, who wrote the bylaws to ensure that 20 percent of the plots in the garden would be set aside to grow food that will be donated to charity.

Because the pear-filled red buckets, weighing 60 pounds or more, were deemed too heavy to carry up the slope to the garden where the tables for the pot luck dinner had been decorated, the victorious weigh-in was held behind Tracy Gilchrist’s car at the foot of the Community Garden. Tracy, who led the harvest on Saturday, had kept the pears in her car since the harvest, also known as a “gleaning.”

Don Converse and Team Food Pantry co-chair Sally Malone hoisted the buckets from Tracy’s

car and placed them on Pattie Baker’s “talking” scale. The audio scale “announced” that the first bucket didn’t weight enough to reach the goal, nor did the addition of a small box of pears. The second bucket, however, put them over the top.

“Wooohooo!” shouted Shawn Bard, Team Food Pantry co-chair as Sally clapped happily nearby. Then Sally and Pattie exchanged two-handed high fives, and the remaining bucket was weighed.

The total came to 224 pound of pears and a proud moment for Team Food Pantry.

The pears will be included with the Tuesday harvest from the Community Garden and made available to Malachi’s Storehouse at St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church for distribution on Wednesday. Many of the recipients of items from Malachi’s are Spanish, and Tracy is collecting recipes for the pears, which are small seckel pears typically are used for cooking and pickling. She will have the recipes translated into Spanish. The goal is to ensure that the families who receive the pears know how to use them since these are not pears that would be eaten the way an apple might be enjoyed as a healthy snack.

Four volunteers participated in the pear gleaning on Saturday morning, Tracy and her husband, Carl, Laura Freeman-Hines and Ann Dovanguy.

They didn’t climb the tree and shake the limbs to loosen the pears because a large poison ivy vine (Toxicodendron radicans) was growing up the trunk and into the canopy. And the bed of ivy in which the tree was growing also was filled with poison ivy. Unfortunately, they didn’t spot the poison ivy until they were in the midst of it.

Undeterred by the threat of the irritating effects of the noxious vine and a few too-friendly yellow jackets, they shook pears from the tree with a long pole and a rake. Tracy even brought a pitchfork to the harvest. “Necessity is the mother of invention!” she exclaimed as she leaned it against a fence rail.

With temperatures and humidity rising, rest breaks became more frequent. At one point Carl went home and returned with cold, wet wash cloths so everyone could wipe their faces and try to cool down a little.

Rubber-necking neighbors who drove by and were curious about what was going on also helped create mini-rest breaks. People out for a morning walk were equally curious.

“Are those walnuts?” asked Susan Buterbaugh, who walked by with her husband, Mark, from the adjacent Spalding Glen subdivision.

When the volunteers told passersby they were harvesting pears for charity, all seemed surprised to learn they even had a pear tree in the neighborhood.

They appeared happy, though, to know the food was going to the needy. Gale Silverman, who lives across the street from Davis and was out watering shrubbery, even offered to loan three ladders to the cause.

By that time, though, the four volunteers had been out in the heat and humidity for two hours and were ready to call it a day.

They’d pulled, knocked and rattled all of the pears off the tree that their poles and rake could reach.

Perhaps another group that comes out to finish the job can use the ladders. They might also want to wear long sleeves, long pants and gloves.

Suffering from the itchy rash of poison ivy is no way to celebrate a birthday -- or mark a milestone.

Community garden elects new officers

Members of the Dunwoody Community Garden held a Board of Directors election and voted to make a change to their bylaws Sunday evening.

The members of the new Board of Directors are:
Don Converse, chair
Muriel Knope
Nicole Maslanka
Theresa Meshed
Angela Minyard
Rod Pittman
Susan Wynn

The new Board members take office immediately and will serve a term of two years.

The change in the bylaws allows for electronic voting.