Master Gardeners grow produce at home for food pantries

Every year, Sussex County Master Gardeners tend the demonstration garden created by program members 20 years ago behind the county cooperative extension office west of Georgetown. It’s been called a hidden gem in Delaware.

This year, the demonstration garden was closed to the public and to the master gardeners due to COVID-19. The virus also put a lot of people out of work and greatly increased the need for donated food. 

Before the pandemic, of the 32 specialty gardens within the one-acre demonstration garden, six were dedicated to growing vegetables in the ground, in raised beds and in containers. The entire harvest, more than 1,000 pounds in some years, is donated to the Cape Henlopen Food Basket, a Delaware food pantry.

In order to continue food pantry donations this year, the master gardeners organized a foster gardener program. A group of 11 master gardeners volunteered to grow produce at home and deliver the vegetables to their local food banks. A few of them had never grown vegetables before, and some of the experienced vegetable growers had not previously grown the particular crops they took on this season or had not grown them in pots before. The effort was a growing experience all the way around.

Produce grown in the foster garden program included asparagus, peas, basil, bush and pole beans, butternut squash, chard, corn, cucumbers, eggplant, kale, kohlrabi, lettuces, mustard greens, onions, parsley, sweet and hot peppers, pineapple sage, potatoes, radishes, sweet potatoes, tomatoes and zucchini. Master gardeners also donated herbs and cut flowers from their own gardens.

Hurricane Isaias blew down cornstalks, and flooded and rotted some of the potatoes. The heat took out the mustard greens and some of the tomato plants, and slowed the production of almost everything else. Cabbage worms went after the kale, birds pecked the tomatoes, deer and rabbits found the sweet potato vines quite tasty, and a groundhog wrecked one master gardener’s entire garden. But the gardeners carried on. 

At the end of the season in October, donations totaled 104 pounds of fresh vegetables for food pantries in five locations across the county.

For more information about growing vegetables at home, contact the master gardener garden helpline at 302-856-2585, Ext. 535. To find out where, when and how to donate fresh produce at area food pantries, go to fbd.org/produce/.