Shifting Times

Greetings from the Sharing Gardens! We certainly are in 'shifting times'! Some areas of our amazing planet are receiving unprecedented flooding while others can't seem to break out of a drought cycle. Far more people fall into financial hardship each year and the natural world continues to face threats from all sides. So, how do we respond? We believe each of us has a unique role to play and that ours at the Sharing Gardens is to continue to demonstrate the power of generosity and mutual aid. Read below about the local challenges we are facing and how we are rising to meet them.

Service Learning student

The Sharing Gardens are a unique style of community garden. Instead of separate plots that people rent from the owners of the land, we all garden together, for free! This has great benefits: it makes watering more efficient, one is able to grow pure seed, pest management is simplified, all while growing more food in the same amount of space. Overview and Benefits of the Sharing Gardens. 

Our 'sharegivers' (volunteers) join us through all parts of the food-growing cycle, including: planting, mulching, weeding, making compost, harvesting, processing grains and beans by hand and saving seed. Our garden is a school, and a sanctuary for people and the natural world. 

The food that is grown is shared among those who help grow it or contribute in other ways.The surplus is donated to food charities.

Sharegivers (volunteers) sharing in the harvest - 2016

Over the last several years, the focus of the Sharing Gardens has shifted. In the beginning (16 years ago!) our main objective was to grow the greatest volume of high-quality vegetables as we could (over 6,000 measured pounds annually, from 2012 - 2015!) and share them all freely (no one charged for the food that is grown). When we started out, we were the only gardeners providing significant amounts of produce to the food charities we served.

Llyn, with less than half of one week's donations to our local Food Pantry - 2017 (cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots, beans, squash, greens). This was before other gardeners in the community began making significant donations.

Gradually, our town's Food Pantry (S. Benton Food Pantry) began benefiting from donations from other sources: Family gardens began contributing significant amounts of summer-fresh produce: tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers etc. In addition, SBFP also began collecting summer produce from the Corvallis Farmer's Market (produce left over at day's end that the farmers couldn't sell) and receiving staple crops such as potatoes from local small-scale farmers who received grants to grow specifically for Food Pantries. All this on top of the commodity crops provided through USDA support (apples, oranges etc).

Our same Pantry's produce tables, Oct. 2025. Our cabbage, cukes and greens are squeezed in amongst the other bounty.

With all this additional support, for the last five years or so, there were many times during the peak summer months of garden production that it was literally impossible to find room on the tables at the pantry for our donations! (Now that's what I call a 'high-quality problem!'). Also, during this time, our volunteer support began to dwindle, so gradually we shifted away from producing significant surplus of these 'summer-ripening' crops that need tending and harvesting throughout their peak season and began focusing more on storage crops like dried beans and grains, winter squash along with cabbage and root vegetables such as potatoes, carrots and beets. But it's hard to grow enough of these crops to make much of a difference at food pantries. We primarily only share them with the people who help us grow the food.

Summertime harvest from our gardens at peak season, 2022.

This was what we planned to do again this year when we heard that massive funding cuts have been announced that will reduce the amount of produce coming from government-funded sources including USDA commodity foods and grants for farmers. This has sent ripples of alarm through the food-charity community and will have significant impacts on their ability to distribute fresh produce.

Sharing Gardens donation of lettuce to Local Aid, Junction City - 2015

It's not too late for the Sharing Gardens to step up and return to producing more of the summer-ripening produce. But this would take much stronger volunteer support than we've received in recent years and at this point we're not sure this is the best focus for our energies and resources. The summer-ripening crops (tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers etc) with their pruning, watering, weeding and weekly, or bi-weekly harvests, take more energy than growing storage crops like winter squash, dried grains and beans which, once planted, mulched and weeded a few times don't need much attention till autumn harvests and, if the past 5-7 years are any indicator, Food Charities (at least the ones we're in regular contact) with receive lots of donations from local gardeners of these summer-ripening crops anyway.

Elisa and Maiya with a donation to the SB Food Pantry: tomatoes, cantaloupe and greens.

It is our strong feeling that we are in a better position to continue developing methods and mentoring others in the areas that are less commonly addressed through regular gardening sites; things like small-scale dried grain and bean production and processing, and seed saving; and to be available to coach others wanting to start sharing-type gardens in their own communities.

That being said, there is still room this season in the Monroe Sharing Gardens for a handful of committed folks who want to learn how to grow food and save seed in a cooperative environment; in a spirit of mutual generosity. If, after reading this info about our volunteer program, you feel like it's a good fit, we hope you'll be in contact with us.

Meanwhile, we are grateful to see that some of this 'mutual generosity' is already showing up. We are heartened that our neighbor Deb Moss has offered to bring her small tractor and till up a bunch of ground that has been invaded by grasses. This will allow us to use our garden space more efficiently, whatever crops we grow. 

Vincent Drew has reached out to us from Linn/Benton Food Share, the warehouse/coordination-center that distributes food to most of the food charities in our area. He has offered to come help in the gardens when we have a particularly large harvest, to pack it up in LBFS totes and take it directly to the warehouse refrigerators for distribution.

Chris and Joey sharing in the autumn apple harvest.

So, while in some ways we feel a sense of nostalgia for the early days of the gardens with its dynamic pace and sheer abundance in productivity, we're also grateful that our program still has relevance to our changing times. We still are growing impressive amounts of food; all shared freely and our role as mentors and educators continues to expand. We are so happy when we hear of other community gardens shifting to the Sharing Gardens model and like to believe that in some small way, we helped to plant and nurture this seed of generosity by what we've demonstrated here.

Volunteers help with all aspects of growing food: shifting mushroom compost for soil-fertility.

Weeding is a lot more fun with company.

When kids help grow food, they're more likely to enjoy eating it!

Gallery of Givers: Highlights from the 2023 Season

This has been a wonderful year at the Sharing Gardens; much bounty, new friendships. Our experiments with Local, Plant-sourced Fertility (LINK: How we grow...Veganic Community-based gardening) continue to yield massive quantities of highest quality soil/compost. Both our seed collection and our wildlife habitat grows with each year. Our lives, (me and Chris) are centered on this land, this project, this lifestyle. We are so fortunate to be able to to give all our focus to our life here at the Sharing Gardens.

And yet, we couldn't have done it without the dedicated help of our wonderful share-givers. Here is a gallery of some of the year's highlights. (That's Joey - above, sifting compost scooped out of our greenhouse paths. Joey joined our crew this summer. He's been such an amazing contribution to the program. He's strong and generous of spirit and always willing to do whatever needs to get done.)

Share-givers typically come once a week for about three hours but we had two gung-ho helpers who managed to come twice a week for much of the summer, Joey and Maddie. Here they are harvesting elephant garlic in June. (Maddie had to go back to school this fall. We miss you Maddie, but we hope you'll come play in the Gardens again next summer and bring some of your young, strong, healthy friends!)

Sometimes we work in small groups:

Chris, Joey and Jim digging potatoes.

Another group potato-dig. This was our best year yet. We harvested just over 400 pounds!

Joey and Donn sift the compost we scoop out of our greenhouse paths. Chris here is bagging it in repurposed bags from pellet-stove fuel. In 2023, we estimate that we harvested about 200 bags of this 'black gold"! This becomes the foundation of our potting mix (which we haven't bought in several years) and is alsso used as a soil amendment in all our garden beds.

Suzanne, Darlene and Chris sifting compost. It's full of worm eggs which then hatch over the course of the winter while still in the bags, or in the garden beds next spring.

Venecia and Michael from OSU's Service Learning program, help Chris gather apples in the midst of a downpour. The light was incredible that day; golden-peachy, coming through the clouds, rain in showers and everything washed clean and bright - including the air. It was a great fruit year this past summer! This is the first year these trees, planted in 2013, yielded significant fruit. And boy did they!

In these next two pics, OSU students from a Sustainability class performed service learning at the Sharing Gardens and received college credit for their efforts.

One of the tasks they performed was to load leaves onto tarps and distribute them in the beds we eventually grew winter squash in. We are especially grateful to the Dillards and Crosby's - two neighborhood households who donate the vast majority of their leaves to our project. They bring them by the trailer-load!

Sometimes it's great just to be in pairs...

Darlene and Sandra - fun in the potato patch!

Suzanne and Darlene cutting up apples for applesauce. Our fruit trees were amazingly productive (as were most trees in the southern Willamette valley of western Oregon where we live.). We canned 49 quarts of applesauce. Lots for us and lots to share!

More autumn tasks...Jim is teasing the sorghum seed-heads off their stalks (Grow Your Own Sorghum for Grain and Flour). Chris is shelling dried beans (we grew over 50 pounds of dried beans in 2023!) Chris and I held back this year's harvest for our own use and distributed all that was left over from last year amongst our sharegivers. (Grow Your Own Protein: Scarlet Runner beans).

Snacking in the celery patch! Chris and Donn with a big harvest on its way to the food pantry.

And here are a few wonderful solo pics:

Here I am, Llyn, with a bouquet of broccoli comprised of three heads bunched together. Our spring broccoli didn't perform very well but this fall crop grew with great vigor and vitality! There's just no comparison between store-bought and home-grown, fresh broccoli. So sweet and tender!

Jim loves to mow - and we are SO grateful!

Cindy, with her many years experience, is a fast and thorough harvester. Here she is with most of our white onion harvest.

Suzanne, threshing sorghum.

Rook has been a champion sorghum harvester. Here he is with a variety called Ba Ye Qi which has a short season so it works well in northern climates. He's dealing with some severe health problems this year so missed much of the summer/fall season. We're holding him in our thoughts and prayers that he'll be able to rejoin us in the spring.

Llyn with part of a day's harvest in the autumn. It's often difficult to find room on all the tables and benches to put everything! Food is distributed first to our sharegivers (including other supporters of the garden such as our neighbors' landscaper, Chuy who brings over all their surplus grass-clippings and leaves) and the copious surplus is donated to food charities.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

...and our beloved Cindy who, like the best Grandma, bakes cookies and pies to share with us at snack time in the Gardens (and sometimes she'll make something just for me and Chris!).

We always love having family and past participants come join us for garden fun...

Llyn's uncle Craig always jumps right in to help whenever he comes to visit. Here he is sifting compost.

We had wonderful visits from Cindy's (left) granddaughter Adri (middle) this summer. Adri's 12 now and has been coming to the gardens since a few months after she was born. She's moved to Tennessee now but on her visit she was a great help in the Gardens. That's Judy on the right; Llyn's Mom. We can't thank her enough for her profound support over the years. Our "greatest fan"! And super-helpful too! In this picture we were telling childhood stories at snack time and having a great laugh!

Here's another one of Judy/Mom teasing baby lettuce plants apart for transplanting into the beds. Thanks for everything, Mom!

And finally...We always try to make time for snacking in the Garden! Here's Chris and Joey enjoying our delicious home-grown apples. (Joey moved to Portland at the end of the season...We miss you Joey!).

It Takes a Village...Gratitude and update

It's been a beautiful spring this year. Though much of eastern Oregon is experiencing severe drought, the Willamette Valley, where we live, has been receiving adequate rainfall, spaced nicely apart. This keeps the grass growing (a major source of mulch and compost-building) and has meant that we spend less time hand-watering our outside crops which is especially crucial when they're first sown or transplanted.

March in the Ark greenhouse.

May in the Sunship greenhouse. Scarlet runner beans (left) were seeded in January and now (mid-June) are already loaded with beans!

Though we're in a bit of a lull now between the spring greens (lettuce, kale and such) and summer's bounteous, heat-loving crops, we've still managed to fill six CSA boxes per week, feed ourselves and our volunteers and still been able to donate a surplus of over 180 pounds of vegetables to food charities in our area. Once the summer bounty comes on, the number will go way up!

Chris, transplanting clusters of bunching onions.

Our largest greenhouse, the Sunship, had the honor of hosting a litter of three baby bunnies last month. One of our volunteers was startled by the mulch moving just inches from where he was preparing a bed for planting. They've already left the nest just two weeks after we discovered them. Hopefully the neighborhood cats won't find them. The wild rabbits have never been a problem in our garden as they seem to prefer eating the clover in our lawns to any domesticated veggies we grow.

Three baby bunnies the first day we found them nested in the mulch in our greenhouse.

Three weeks later, we spotted this one near our wood-shed, a week after s/he left the nest. We've seen another one that likes to hide under the scarlet runner beans in the greenhouse where s/he was born.

We have birds and butterflies and other pollinators galore. Our Showy Milkweed patches continue to expand and though we've yet to see any Monarch butterflies (for which they are a host plant), there are plenty of other pollinators (including hummingbirds) that seem to enjoy the flowers' sweet scent.

Milkweed started from seed four years ago is now naturalized in three places on our land and comes back each year. A favorite of many pollinators - including hummingbirds.

There's a saying from African tribal peoples that "It takes a village to raise a child". Here at the Sharing Gardens, it "takes a village," to grow the food, provide habitat for wildlife and a sanctuary to those people who visit here for respite from the hubbub of day-to-day life. It has been our goal all along to demonstrate a model of "mutual generosity",  where "sharing" is an experience of reciprocity; of giving and receiving, but not everyone is in a position to be generous. Though some folks are primarily at the receiving end of the gardens, there are others who primarily give and some for whom the giving and receiving happen more or less equally. By everyone doing what they can do, this keeps the project sustainable over time. (LINK: Overview and Benefits of the Sharing Gardens Model).

As Anne Frank has been purported to say, "No one has ever become poorer by giving." It has actually been our experience that generosity has increased our sense of abundance and prosperity. 

We've received $2,190 in cash donations since our last gratitude-post in February. Thank you to the South Benton Food Pantry (LINK), John and Donna Dillard, Karen and Stan Salot and Cathy Rose.

We are grateful to our small but mighty volunteer crew: Donn and Marilyn Dussell, Jim, Cindy and Adri Kitchen, Rook Stillwater, and Becky Bauer. There's still room for a few more folks on our crew. For more info, CLICK HERE.

Donn, tilling a bed for squash to grow in.

Marilyn loves to mow!

Jim's our other champion mower. Just look at all that luscious mulch!

Llyn and Cindy always look forward to gardening together each week. Here we are planting lettuce and onions.

Adri, dead-heading the calendula flowers.

Rook, digging compost, coffee-grounds and wood-ash into the garden beds.

Becky, starting seeds.

Our collection site for bagged leaves and grass clippings continues to be very successful. This is a clear example of reciprocal generosity: the Sharing Gardens provides free re-used leaf bags and a free site for people to dispose of their yard-waste (which would otherwise end up in burn-piles or the land fill) and we receive as much organic matter as we can use to mulch and feed our gardens. (LINK: Create your own 'veganic' potting mix).

Our collection site for leaves and grass-clippings in front of our wonderful yellow house.

A special thank you to our friend John Kinsey who generated hundreds of pellet-bags of compost for us over the winter and continues to bring us coffee grounds from a local drive-through cafe' every week. Thanks also to Lua who brought us a load of leaf mold (from Harry McCormack at Sunbow Farms - one of the founders of Oregon Tilth and a pioneer in the organics movement) to enhance our garden's fertility.

John Kinsey with garlic "seeds".

Just a fraction of the "tea" John makes from his worm-compost. We use it to feed our plants.

Firewood is our only source of heat, and our primary means of cooking and drying our laundry in the winter. This year we are feeling especially grateful for the community's generosity regarding firewood. We have received donations of wood "rounds" from David and Jo Crosby (who had a couple of oak trees fall down in a bad storm two years ago). Bob and Cheryl Ballard brought us a load of fir to be split. Thank you to the Dussells for the loan of your splitter too!

Chris, splitting firewood.

We are grateful to our five and a half CSA subscribers and to David Roux and Dallice Drake for their $250 scholarship donation which covers most of the second half of the membership to a low-income family who is committed to eating healthy food to stay cancer-free after the Mom contracted an aggressive case several years ago. (She's been cancer-free for over a year now and attributes some of her success to receiving a CSA box last year as well.) Thanks to Catherine Henry who perused our Wish List and keeps finding items we can use.

Thanks to Communities Magazine and Chris Roth, editor - for publishing our article on Veganic Soil Fertility with Local Materials - in their latest issue on "Ecological Culture" Whatever your living situation, whether in a large community or small household, you can adapt these methods to grow food with a lighter footprint on the planet. (LINK to order a copy of the whole issue on Ecological Culture ($5.00 for digital copy. $10 for digital copy and hard copy mailed to you in the USA - see drop down menu) LINK to Global Ecovillage Network - USA - publishers of the magazine.

And last, but not least: thanks to all our unsung partners in garden abundance: the pollinators, bug- and slug-eaters (birds) and the billions of microbes and soil organisms for whom without their contributions, the gardens would soon cease to exist.

If you feel inspired to leave a comment, please do so below so everyone can enjoy it. Thanks.