The Food Co-op’s Community GROW Fund Enables Deliveries to the PT Food Bank by Bicycle!

Juri started a service to deliver Co-op goods by bike, called PeddlerPT. How cool is that?! Rick of Cape Cleare and Heidi, one of our volunteer drivers who used to bike salmon for Rick, helped Juri develop her trailer system and passed on their insider tips, like how to ride a utility bike in the wind without tipping over or blowing away.

The 2020 Community Grow Fund was awarded to Food Bank Farm & Gardens of Jefferson County (FBFG), a local non-profit, charitable organization that grows fresh, organic vegetables for the county’s food banks. The award enabled the organization to expand an existing bicycle delivery service, Peddler PT, to include vegetable harvest pick-ups at food bank production gardens in Port Townsend, as well as produce donations from other community gardens, for weekly delivery to the PT Food Bank.

This service was particularly needed during the pandemic, as food bank users could no longer come inside the food bank to pick up groceries. They needed to pick up food boxes using their cars, and this method produced long lines of waiting cars and families. This traffic congestion was reduced significantly by the bicycle delivery service’s ability to replace many car trips that transported fresh harvests from many gardens.

The Grow Fund was used to match existing funds that had already been donated by private individuals to Peddler PT to create a stipend to pay for increased services to transport the fresh local harvests. It also paid for two banners for the bike trailer that helped increase safety and advertise this service to local shoppers in need of delivery services.

Peddler PT’s primary cyclist, Juri Jennings, said of the garden pickups, “The freshly picked produce is so lovely and fresh flowers grown by our town’s production gardeners are so beautiful, it is a joyful experience to provide this service for the food bank!”

Last year FBFG’s 8 production garden sites delivered more than 12,000 pounds (6 tons) of fresh organic produce (including chicken and duck eggs) to Jefferson County’s food banks. This year has seen even more production sites joining the network of volunteer efforts to provide high quality organic produce for the people of our county in need of food.

Photo caption: Juri Jennings is delighted to pick up food and flowers from the Quimper Grange’s Food Bank Garden managers, Barbara and Jo.

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Food Co-op has its own Food Bank Garden too!

In an exciting new partnership, the Food Bank Farm & Gardens will be tending to the Food Co-op’s garden on the south side of the building. As the outside dining opens up this spring, people will enjoy a luscious garden view.

There are three parts to the garden. The front area features showy ornamentals and herbs that the deer won’t munch on. This garden will also block some of the street noise and add privacy for Co-op members eating in the patio area.

The main part of the garden is for growing vegetables for food bank donations. Chris, who does maintenance for the Co-op, designed a sturdy deer fence that four volunteers helped put together and erect around that garden. Kevin was one of the hard working volunteers pounding holes in the ground for the fence poles. A man who watched us working and had construction experience volunteered to help as well. While the fence was being built, we also laid out a winding path down the middle of the garden and filled it with rocks.

Then over the next couple of weeks, Tammy spent several hours weeding out the main garden to get it ready for the new veggie starts. We acquired three flats of starts from the Food Bank Farm & Garden sale. Several dedicated volunteers finished weeding and planted the seedlings in the pouring rain. There was still more room in the garden, so we got more plants and Lauren came the following Saturday to work several hours planting and sifting weeds and rocks from the dirt to dump in the front bed.

There is also a small area at the back of the garden that isn’t fenced, so Hilary planted it with different herbs and members of the allium family, like onions and elephant garlic, that are unappealing to deer.

Now that some of the veggies have grown, the vegetables and some herbs are harvested on Saturday mornings and walked up to the food bank. The vegetable garden, besides providing food for the food bank, will also be a demonstration garden to highlight vegetables that grow well in our area. Labels and information will let people know the names of the plants.

Thanks to all the hardworking volunteers, Chris, and the Food Co-op’s generous donation of the garden and fence, we are off to a great start to provide food for the Port Townsend Food Bank.

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For our first year administering the Grow Fund, the Committee met in September, reviewed all of the applicants, and decided to grant $855 to the Community Wellness Project to help establish garden beds in the Chimacum School District.

What is the Grow Fund?

In 2018, we decided to leverage the funds generated by our Cooperative Community Fund to grow our local food system and its impact. The Cooperative Community Fund is an endowment fund established by a group of cooperatives to support other cooperatives and to enable community giving. The Fund lends the pooled money to cooperatives. Each year, the interest generated by an individual co-op’s fund—we call ours the GROW Fund—can be donated to nonprofits and cooperatives in their community as cash grants

We plan to focus our grant giving to local Jefferson County nonprofits and co-ops that fit within our four pillars of community sharing:

Improving food access

Sustainable agriculture (both land and sea stewardship)

Healthy kids, families and animals

Supporting the cooperative model

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Previous Grow Fund Projects funded