Consider the onions in the field: They did not self-sow, and neither will they reap.
More than 75 volunteers stooped over a half-acre of Western Hills Park on Valentine's Day to plant 25,000 onion sets.
"By the end, everybody was all on the same row, a 200-foot row," says their overseer, Nathanael Wills, himself a volunteer with the Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance's Arkansas Gleaning Project. "It's about 20 onions to a foot, so it's quite daunting to hand-plant an entire 200-foot row of onions."
But willing hands made light work, poking sprig after flimsy green sprig of the onion hybrid "Candy" through black mulching cloth and down into the damp soil of the alliance's first Gleaning Garden in a city park.
The half-acre field is not a community garden: Come June, none of Wills' helpers will be sauteing those sweet, baseball-size, golden-skinned onions or mashing the potato crop that's going in beside them after the field dries out from recent snow and rain. The harvest will feed strangers -- men, women and children served by Arkansas Food Bank and area food pantries.
As a partnership with Little Rock Parks and Recreation, the Western Hills garden breaks new ground for the Gleaning Project. Throughout its nine-year history, the statewide hunger-relief effort has, for the most part, gleaned -- picked leftovers -- from commercial farming operations, and that is still its main focus, says Jeremy Adams, the project's food sourcing and logistics manager.
Once or twice a year the project holds a public event -- like the onion planting and the popular Watermelon Crawl at Scott -- so volunteers can lend a hand. "But the majority of the harvesting we do is with the Department of Correction," Adams says.
He credits crews of inmates with doubling the amount of food collected to feed the hungry: "We've done 1.5 million pounds of food through that program the last two years," he says.
But tons more go to waste in fields every season. Like backyard gardeners, large growers produce more than they can handle. Also, commercial farms can't sell produce that's blemished, not quite round, a bit too small, a lot too big, dog-eared by the weather, needled by insects.
"Basically, the grocery store only wants the No. 1's and No. 2's," Adams says, "and so the 3's, 4's, 5's and 6's, they just leave them in the field." And this is nutritious food. "You can definitely do something with it. You can preserve it or combine a whole bunch of little ones to make a meal."
Farms that partner with the alliance -- the number varies from 12 to 18 around the state from year to year -- can pick up the phone, and at no cost to the donor, Adams will arrange for inmate gleaners to prevent that food from rotting on the ground. The food proceeds to the nearest of six regional food banks.
"Everybody likes that," he says, "even the farmer."
The donated yield is documented with a tax receipt issued by the Society of Saint Andrew.
The project also works with smaller operations like Wills' Felder Farm, which has a booth at Hillcrest Farmers Market. (Wills is also a gardening teacher employed by the Parent-Teacher Association of Pulaski Heights Elementary School.)
"When my connection started with the hunger alliance, I would just grow one row of cabbage for them, like a 65-foot row of cabbage," Wills says. "They would provide the transplants, and I would plant them, grow them, keep them, take care of them, and call [Adams] when it was time to harvest."
Adams says that partnership taught him a lesson: "The first year, we did some cabbage and some tomatoes. Tomatoes you have to pick three times a week. So I was out there three times a week for about 75 pounds of tomatoes, which just really wasn't a good use of time.
"So we went back to the drawing board. We were like, 'Next year let's plant something that we can harvest all at the same time.'"
Wills credits Read Admire, a student in the Clinton School of Public Service, with noticing how much tillable land lay fallow at Western Hills Park, a former golf course less than a five-minute drive from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.
"The park has plenty of land and tractors and know-how, and the hunger alliance has this need," Wills says, "and the hunger alliance was willing to pay for seed and fertilizer and provide volunteers and labor for harvest."
He started seedlings in the city parks' greenhouses, and the city installed water lines and paid the water bill.
In the first season, August to November, "we grew collards, mustard greens, turnips, beets and carrots," Wills says. "Then we had our volunteers come harvest, and then it was too much for the volunteers to harvest, so we started having inmates come harvest. That went really well."
Adams adds that the half-acre plot produced 9,000 pounds of food at a cost to the alliance of about $400 -- "a lot of bang for my buck," as he puts it. So he's keen to form partnerships with other city parks -- and other cities. Interested managers can contact him at (501) 399-9999.
Of course, he's still looking for large commercial partners as well as smaller market farmers and even backyard gardeners overwhelmed by their crops. "If there's a place where we can bring volunteers in and pick what they've grown for them," he says, and assuming his crews aren't already needed elsewhere, they'll be there.
Meanwhile, the Western Hills Park Gleaning Garden will expand.
"The onions and potatoes will come out around the first of June, and then we'll go into a cover crop for the summer, which means we won't grow a crop for harvest," Wills says. "We'll grow a crop to improve our soil for the summer.
"We're going to develop two more spots so we can rotate our crops around in the same area. ...
"We're constantly looking for help in transplanting or harvesting," Wills says. "It will be a ton of onions when they come out of the field."
Anyone who'd like to volunteer at public gleanings can register for announcements through arhungeralliance.org. or monitor the Facebook pages of Felder Farm and Arkansas Hunger Relief Alliance.
High Profile on 03/08/2015