1st Deliveries of 2016

Well we finally got our first major deliveries finished this week. We harvested 138 pounds of produce, 115 pounds of Allisa Craig sweet onions, Red River red onions, Candy onions along with 23 pounds of zucchini. The harvest went to Rose Haven Women and children day shelter, Independent Living Resources, PACS (Portland Adventist Community Services) and Ronald McDonald House Northwest. I know what we do isn’t in huge quantities that look amazing, and the pounds astronomical, but we grow all the food on donated land and along with a small team of labor we work really hard to make sure the people that need the food get, get the food. We are mostly out of pocket and everyone involved is dedicated in making sure everyone we can possibly reach, gets the opportunity to eat fresh, non GM, GMO or GE foods that are grown naturally with organic practices. I post the pounds donated because we work so hard to grow the food, and so much time, effort and love goes into each planning, planting, maintinence and caring for each crop, that we are really proud of ourselves for being able to accomplish those tasks. I really give all the credit to my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ for putting me on this path, and DOC for the opportunity to learn and get hands on experence. It’s a small payback for all the taking I have done in my life. I hope we will be able to continue to grow food and disperse it where it is needed most, in our community of elderly, shut-ins and the disadvantaged. I also want to thank everyone who follows us, and helps us with our needs, thank you all and God bless.

-yurbob

Insectary at Halsey

April is feeling more like June, if you ask me? The weather has been beautiful, and the yard is full of our favorite insect, the honey bee. I decided to let our Halsey garden go fallow this season because of the addition of the Bybee and Leighton garden sites. What that means is that, the last season of collards and kale I let bolt, and that’s like a calling card for pollinators, so many flowers and the yard is just humming with bees. We hope that sometime soon we will be getting a colony or two and possibly be able to share some honey with some of the agencies we support? My thought was to put honey in small baby food type jars and give them away to people in need? We will be planting the Terry Site again this  year after it was left fallow for a few seasons so we could rotate crops, and be better stewards of the soil. We pray that everyone has a great season growing food, and make an effort to share some of it with someone that wouldn’t normally have access to healthy food. Remember to try and use heirloom varieties if you can and shoot for some OMRI certified or naturally made insecticides and soaps for deterrents!

Cheers to a successful 2016!

Bob Dinges

Organizer and Founder of Giving Vegetable Gardens Charity

 

 

 

Self Supporting

So for a long time we have talked about being “self supporting through our own contributions”. Trying to create a product we can sell on the open market to help with the costs of running our charity.Some of the products we talked about, were a sauce or salsa of some sort, but until we have reached that cross road I have decided to donate the proceeds from the sales of my ceramic art to Giving Vegetable Gardens. My Face Book site is Yur bobs art, I’m hoping I can sell or custom make pieces to order, I have a few things that I do make and sell and that’s the bull skulls, coffee mugs, bowls and assorted styles of fish. The skulls and fish range in price according to size and glazes and types of detail, if you are interested in possibly purchasing one of my pieces please contact me through the yur bobs art site and we can talk about what you might like to order and a price. I will be setting up a Pay Pal site so there’s a way to pay, if you would like to send a payment for a particular item that you see in a picture we can work that out as well. It takes money to grow, harvest and transport the vegetables and fruit we grow to all the different agencies we support, so I’m hoping that this might help us to help others.

Cheers to you all!

Your Bob

 

Working on the Albina Site

We have been so busy trying to get the Albina site ready for this new spring season, this will be our first season on this property and hope it will be a good one? We already have onions, blueberries, fava beans, and strawberries planted and have the herbs in the cold frame, so they will be ready soon. We will have a video coming out this summer on grafting tomatoes, we will be doing this video with Lettuce Grow Garden Foundation, so stay tuned for that! Here is some new pics of the Albina site, enjoy and remember to let us know if we can help with planting and soil advice!

Better Late Than Never

I have been so busy with school this last 2 months, and have been putting off the whole getting planted for winter crops. We have decided that we will put in a ton of garlic, let the Swiss chard winter over along with some other greens, we will pull everything else, mulch and compost the rest of the beds and say good night to the garden…well as much as you can say goodnight anyway. This last year has been a real eye opener to what we need to do and how we need to partner up with other vegetable growers. Better planning, more volunteers and hopefully more of our family members would get involved this next season? It was really great to have Jami here last summer, she was a huge help and no task was too small or big for her, we hope she will return in the spring to help us do it again? Jason was the garden master in Beaverton at the Terry site, he grew the best quality vegetables and kept a steady flow of them to the pantries, we can only hope and pray he will do it again next year and take on an even bigger role…feeling hopeful : ) We need to figure out a plan for the Hicks site and also the Navajo site? We might have to drop the Navajo site if we can’t get a solid a crew to manage it, Kathie Katie said she would help with it, but it would be so nice to have some students from Clackamas Community Hort. Dept. help with the site?

Cheers from yurbob

FUNDRAISING and FEEDING PEOPLE

I’m finding that fundraising is just about a full time job! I am not very good at it and hope that in the future I will get better at it? Trying to raise money for our 501c3 and for the cargo bikes has been really hard for me. Approaching people and asking for money is hard with the economy the way it is, and I don’t think things will get much better anytime to soon? What I think is, if that is the case, then what is to become of all the people forced to eat garbage and food that is empty, or the food that is so GM, GMO or GE that it is just killing them? I believe the whole Genetically Modified Movement is just a way for our Government to manage death! You start putting pesticides in food then pretty soon all those organisms that help digest your food and all those pro-biotic and every other good organism in your body will disappear, and then your body will start to malfunction and shut down, and just like that you are in the system! What’s next? Hospitals, Pharmacies, and most of us would get buried under the costs and never get out alive! Eating food that is good for our bodies is a RIGHT, and what’s happened is that it has become a PRIVILEGE, reserved only to the people that can afford to buy “organic” or “naturally grown”, and let me tell you those people are not the ones on a budget, of any kind! I challenge you to go to a grocery store of your choice and watch the produce section, watch who buys “organic”? Better yet, watch who buys “organic”, and how much do they buy? The working class, the less fortunate, the people who live paycheck to paycheck are the ones forced to buy the filler foods, processed and empty, certainly not organic or naturally grown!

Giving Vegetable Gardens Charity is trying to change that, starting from the bottom up! Starting with the people that normally wouldn’t have access to food grown Naturally, void of anything that will hurt them! We grow our food using methods these “Organic” farms use, in fact we go one better, we use the same methods the “Naturally Grown” farms use we just haven’t gotten our certification yet because everyone wants money to use their ” Method”. We grow our food naturally, and give that food to the ones in need, through agencies that are local right here in Portland, Oregon City, and West Linn Oregon! We believe that everyone should have the “RIGHT” to eat food that is good for them, so that’s what we do, and we need your help to keep it going! we need to file our 501c3, we need a cargo bike for NE and SE Portland deliveries, we need everyone to go to our “GOFUNDME” page and give what you can? Even a coffees worth will help! Many hands make light work! Our three gardens cannot keep up with the demand, but that’s a good thing, because that tells us we are on the right track! More gardens means more food, more food means healthier people and a better life from the bottom up! Our website and Facebook Page are easily found as is the “gofundme” thanks everyone that has helped us and thank you to everyone who is even considering to help, it is a noble cause and one you should connect with!

givingvegetablegardenscharity.org

Cheers and God Bless

Bob and everyone at Giving Vegetable Gardens Charity

 

Turning the Soil

Time for us to turn the soil over in some of our raised bed and cover with organic compost, and plan the next planting. A friend of ours is going to take the corn stalks from our organic sweet corn we harvested, and give them to his cows, he says its like candy to them. Glad we could make that part of recycling complete, well almost, the cows haven’t eaten them yet ! We are going to plant Kale in where the corn was, I haven’t picked out which Kale it will be, but will let you know as soon as we decide. Heres a picture of the corn stalks!

Organic Sweet Corn Stalks, ready do be cut down and given to those cows to make fertilizer out of !