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Make The Most From Your
Vegetable Garden
All your hard work has paid off, and now
you are presented with a dilemma, too
many vegetables! After sharing your
wealth with friends, family, co-workers,
neighbors and anyone that happens to come
to visit, there are alternative options
of what you can do with your extensive
supply of tomatoes, zucchini and other
bountiful crops that will bring great joy
to the community around you.
There are many different ways to approach
this, the easiest would be to look up in
your local phone book for organizations
that you could donate your vegetables to.
A good place to start would be food
banks, women’s shelters and half-way
houses. Don’t be discouraged if at
first you are turned down, some community
resources have to follow guidelines that
will not allow them to accept fresh fruit
or vegetables. You can also look up on
the internet for locations near you that
would find great joy in being the
recipient of your sharing.
Another great idea is to do a
“vegetable exchange” with other
gardeners, you neighbor could have a
bumper crop of beans or corn and not a
great harvest on tomatoes, exchanging
them will give you the best of both
vegetables! The only thing of caution
here is that it’s a good idea to
exchange with people that have the same
basic gardening ethics, if you grow
organic vegetables then you may not want
to exchange with someone else that
prefers to use chemicals or pesticides in
their garden.
Preserving your vegetables for the rest
of the year is also a great option. There
are many sources online that can walk you
through step by step on how to preserve
your vegetables, either by canning,
freezing or making something more
specific like salsa sauce with your
tomatoes. You can use the same approach
to this as the idea above as well, have a
variety of vegetables gathered from
people around you and have a harvesting
party. Get each person to bring enough of
something from their vegetable garden
that each person that attends will have
an item to go home with. (For example if
you have zucchini, another has tomatoes,
and yet another has beans, you would walk
away with at least two other types of
vegetables)
The first hint that you need to find
alternative options is to realize that
when your friends, family, and neighbors
start running in the other direction and
turning off all the lights and pretending
they are not home when they see you
walking towards them with more of your
delicious vegetables, that there are
alternatives that will not only help
others in your community but make all
your hard work in your vegetable garden
go a little bit further in spreading the
joy to others.
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