St. Andrew’s Good News Garden brings fresh produce to area food pantries

Browsing tomatoes in the produce section of a grocery store is a task many find mundane as they pick up, turn around and examine each tomato, looking for the best one. But for millions of Americans, fresh produce is a luxury they can’t afford. Instead, they line up at pantries to receive canned food and dry goods.

Food insecurity soared during the pandemic, with 53 million people turning to food banks and community programs to feed their families, according to Feeding America. Food insecure residents from Downers Grove and Westmont looked to the Downers Grove Area FISH food pantry and the Cupboard pantry located inside the Downers Grove Public Library for assistance.

While those resources are meeting a great need, parishioners at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Downers Grove believed they could help meet another dimension of that need – providing healthy, fresh produce to those facing food insecurity.

“Fresh produce tends to be pricey, and people who go to food pantries often do not get that much fresh food, so we’re providing them with something they may not otherwise find,” said Elaine Cook, a parishioner involved with St. Andrew’s Good News Garden.

The Good News Garden is a national effort that asks groups to plant a garden and donate its yields to local food banks. St. Andrew’s got involved in the project as a way to create community amid the global pandemic. Parishioners built garden beds, volunteered to weed, water and harvest the garden, and now, for its second season, bring the garden’s yield to FISH and the Downers Grove Public Library pantry to provide fresh produce to those who may need it.

The church hopes to harvest the garden twice weekly, with two teams of people meeting on Mondays and Fridays to do so. Cook’s involvement with the effort involves keeping a blog that tracks the garden’s harvest as well as serving to inform future decisions about what produce yields the best results and works best to fill the pantries. In its first month of harvesting for this season, the garden produced about four pounds of radishes, which were donated to FISH.

Malinda Hamann, a leader of one of the garden teams, said the blog will help the church maximize its potential to help others. One thing they learned last year, for example, was the difficulty in prepping and delivering garden lettuce, she said. The church also adjusted its garden to account for some of its more popular items such as tomatoes and cucumbers.

“We planted extra tomatoes this year because last year they were such a hit and we want to do what we can to take care of each other and help our neighbors stay healthy,” Hamann said. “We hope this gives people the sense that there are people in the community that want them to have the best of things, not just secondhand things.”

In addition to helping meet the needs of others, Hamann said the garden has helped the church meet its own needs by connecting it with organizations such as FISH and the Downers Grove Public Library. By making these connections, she said, the organizations can work together to better understand and provide for the needs of the community.

Hamann said getting the garden started was easy, and she hopes others can look past the initial intimidation they may feel and start their own Good New Garden to continue to support the local need. Cook, who was new to the gardening world when St. Andrew’s project began, said she has learned a lot from working with the project and hopes others feel encouraged to do the same.

“It’s so important to get certain vitamins and nutrition from fresh produce, and this is a whole category of food we’re able to make available to people who need it,” Cook said. “It takes a lot of work to garden, but we’d love to see other institutions take on something like this because it really fits a response to a need in our community.”