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Community Corner

Art project to benefit food pantry garden

Sale of decorated wine bottle planters, vases will help fund vegetable beds for Malachi's Storehouse at St. Patrick's Episcopal Church

An art-from-the-heart project will help feed families in need in Dunwoody this year.

Volunteers who maintain the food pantry garden for Malachi's Storehouse at St. Patrick's Episcopal Church have launched an art-related project to help buy much-needed supplies for their garden.

Nicole Maslanka, Page Olson, Angela Minyard and others have been collecting wine bottles and bringing them to Pattie Baker, who has taught herself how to cut them into vases and semi-hydroponic planters. The cut bottles are then distributed to several local artists who have volunteered to paint them. Artists contributing their time and talents to the project include accomplished Georgia artist Steve Penley, Nancy Shevitz, Diane Rankin and Susan Shaw.

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Because of the difference in the shape of red and white wine bottles, white wine bottles are being used for vases and the red wine bottles for planters. Volunteers report that labels come off bottles of cheap wine much more easily than from bottles of expensive vintages!

The plan is to offer the decorated bottles for sale with a goal of raising $600 to help fund the garden. Funds from the sale will be used to buy fertilizer, seed, starter plants and to help cover the costs of a small expansion of the garden. A date and format for the sale are still being determined.

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The project has two larger goals: to grow a community of sustainable long-term support for the garden and for it to serve as an example to other groups so that anyone can learn from this effort and replicate and improve upon it for families in need in their area.

Baker, who views the art effort as a pilot project, and Malachi’s Storehouse Co-directors Kathy Malcolm Hall and Mary Louise Wilson presented a program on the St. Patrick’s garden to a Ministry Mentors workshop at the Cathedral of St. Philip in Buckhead on Sunday.

The garden, which is called the Garden of Eatin’, is currently unfunded. “We had money up until the fall from the first fundraising effort and then relied on donated plants for the fall/winter planting,” Baker said in a recent email. Cafe Intermezzo helped volunteers continue gardening through the winter by donating funds to purchase crop row covers, Baker added.

Dunwoody gardeners are invited to get in on the project by donating fresh flowers once the sale begins. The hope among the volunteers is to place fresh flowers from Dunwoody gardens in the vases when they are picked up by the new owners. If you would like more information about  donating flowers for the project, contact Ann DoVanGuy at anndovanguy@gmail.com.

“The world is an abundant place,” Wilson said last week as Garden of Eatin’ volunteers discussed the art project, helped food pantry clients harvest from the garden and added a row of Canadian sunflowers to one end of the beds.

“Last year, Malachi’s fed 22,000 people,” said Nancy Armstrong, a parish member and garden volunteer who brought the sunflowers to the church garden from her sister’s farm in Ontario. “Our goal this year is to donate a ton of food to Malachi’s.”

That food will come from four sources: the church garden, the Community Garden across North Peachtree Road in Brook Run Park, Whole Foods on Ponce de Leon and home gardens in Dunwoody.

Gardeners who would like to donate produce from their personal garden beds can bring the produce to the church for 2 to 3 p.m. on Wednesdays. The address is 4755 N. Peachtree Road.

Tracy Gilchrist, who heads the Community Garden volunteer effort at St. Patrick’s, reports that The Garden of Eatin’ now has a Yahoo email account (thegardenofeatin@yahoo.com). Gardeners can also email this account for more information about how they can help support Malachi’s Storehouse.

The Community Garden will hold a Go Green! party for garden members on Saturday, March 17 at the main garden in Brook Run Park.

Planned as the first of what will be an annual member event to welcome the spring planting season, the party will be held rain or shine from noon to 3 p.m. and feature a pot luck lunch, gardening workshops and a seed swap. Pot luck dishes will be considered for inclusion in the Dunwoody Garden Cookbook project, which Lori Davilla is heading up.

   Workshop topics will include:

  • How to utilize fish fertilizer.
  • Inoculating legumes prior to planting.
  • Using compost tea (demonstration by Rod Pittman).
  • Using compost to amend your garden.
  • Testing the pH of your garden (a pH meter will be on hand).

Gardeners interested in joining the Community Garden should contact the garden by email at membership@dunwoodygarden.org. Information about the garden is available on the garden website at http://dunwoodygarden.wordpress.com/.

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