Garden Details
Garden Details
Our Green Prairie Garden is a partnership with Metro Catholic Outreach food pantry that began in 2014, revitalizing the original Prairiewoods garden into a space that is serving the wider community as well as our kitchen. It is an expansive vegetable garden that now grows 3,000 – 4,000 pounds of produce each year. The vast majority of this produce is shared with those facing food insecurity in our community through two area food pantries. During the growing season, people in our community who don’t have enough to eat are now getting fresh greens, squash, tomatoes and a wide variety of other veggies. Volunteers from the community tend the garden and harvest the vegetables that are delivered to the pantries.
Garden Practices
Garden Practices
Our garden space has been converted to permaculture beds since about 2018. This practice minimizes erosion and builds healthy soil. We rotate our crops from season to season, fertilized primarily with compost, and use only organic safe treatments when necessary.
We grow most typical garden crops like tomatoes, peppers, squash, onions, & beans. We extend our season from early spring into late fall with a hoop house and grow several types of greens, including lettuce, kale, & chard. There are also herbs and less typical crops like sweet potatoes and tomatillos. We grow perennials, including cherries, pears, raspberries, asparagus, and rhubarb.
Most of our garden volunteers come from our eleven area Catholic parishes that support the MCO food pantry. We use students needing service hours on weekends and during the summer, as well as many different types of student, community, and corporate service groups, including the United Way Day of Caring in May. We love to host Boy or Girl Scouts for tours, badge work, or Eagle Projects or Silver/Gold Awards. We enjoy much support from the Prairiewoods and MCO staff.
Additional Information
Additional Information
The past ten years have been pretty hot & dry. This past season began with more rain, but the weeds & pests benefited from the moister conditions. We usually find enough volunteers to water the beds, but are struggling with pest control at times.
We have a need for more regular morning volunteers during the season, especially for harvesting August through October.
We welcome volunteers at any time from March into November.
Donations of time, money, and prayers are appreciated.
We grow really nice sweet potatoes, which are fairly low maintenance once planted & mulched.
Most years, our Roma type tomatoes do very well, and there are almost too many for the pantries to handle
Our Tenth Anniversary season in 2023, we grew over 4200 lbs of produce.
This past season, we harvested over 70 lbs of cherries from our large tree.
