Garlic drying in the gazebo of Yarmouth Community Garden last week. The community food program donated a record 4,456 pounds of produce to feed residents of the town this season. (Courtesy of Yarmouth Community Garden)
YARMOUTH — While the Yarmouth Community Food Pantry is open from 10 a.m. to noon on Tuesdays and Fridays, Tuesdays see a longer line particularly during the summer. Clients line up knowing they can get what might be the freshest produce in town.
“We tell them, this comes from the community garden, and they want it right away,” said Liz Reinsborough, a pantry volunteer.
Just hours earlier and 1.8 miles away, on Tuesday mornings throughout the summer, volunteers harvested a variety of produce including onions, peppers, Swiss chard and raspberries from the Yarmouth Community Garden. The community food garden program then drives the produce directly to the food pantry, as well as to three retirement communities.
Despite a rainy spring and a dry summer, the community food garden broke a record this year, growing and donating 4,456 pounds of produce. This included 650 pounds of potatoes, 646 pounds of onions and 906 pounds of various tomatoes.
“Oh my gosh, they give us so much,” said Reinsborough. “Anything that you can think of that they grow there, they bring to us, and they are absolutely a huge help.”
The garden delivery is sure to include sweet potatoes and pepper, culturally appropriate ingredients that African immigrants and refugees prefer at the pantry.
“We get feedback from the clients of the pantry as to what they want, and we try to accommodate that,” said Ellen Walsh, a member of the garden’s Steering Committee.
The Yarmouth Community Garden began 22 years ago and is one of the longest continually running community gardens in Maine. Locals can rent a plot in the garden each summer for $40-$44, plus six hours of volunteer work in the community food garden. A program of Yarmouth Community Services, it operates with an $18,000 budget funded through rented plots, donations and fundraisers, such as an annual harvest dinner it hosted last week.
With the 130 available plots in the renters’ garden full and many garden lovers pitching in beyond the required contribution, volunteers spent over 800 hours in the garden to make the thousands of pounds of donated food possible. Community Food Garden Coordinator Bob Fowler said the produce is not the only benefit to the community to emerge from this group project.
“There are so many conversations and just people meeting others they wouldn’t otherwise maybe ever meet,” said Fowler. “So we grow food, but there’s so much growing of community that happens just by virtue of people being here in this space.”
“It really is a beautiful community-building endeavor,” he said.
A Yarmouth Community Food Pantry volunteer serves a client through the window of First Parish Church. (Sophie Burchell/Staff Writer)
As the garden goes to bed for the winter, the last load of its produce was delivered to Yarmouth Community Food Pantry last week. The pantry — which also receives produce from Yarmouth’s Hannaford and Good Shepherd Food Bank — anticipates longer lines not just on days specific to community food garden deliveries. As the federal government announced there would be no Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits offered in November due to the government shutdown, food pantries across Maine expect an increase in need.
Serving about 80 Yarmouth families a month, the pantry has already seen an increase in people coming to the window at First Parish Church by about 8% just this week as clients prepare for the federal assistance to end.
“On the client side, there’s a lot of despair,” said Reinsborough. “They’re downtrodden. I mean, they are just feeling like, ‘Why is this happening to us, and what are we going to do?’”
“We had somebody call us yesterday, literally in a panic. ‘My SNAP benefits are going away, and I have no food on my shelves. What could you just tell me?’” said Marti Mayne, a volunteer and Steering Committee member of Yarmouth Cares About Neighbors, the nonprofit that runs the pantry.
“We want people to know that the Yarmouth Community Food Pantry is a place people can turn,” said Mayne.
While the food pantry has seen concern from clients, they are also seeing an increase in support from the town. Typically getting around eight bags of donated food per week, it received 50 bags of donations this week.
“The sentiment we get from people who are able to donate is, ‘How can we help? What do you need?’” said Reinsborough.
“So there is a general sentiment in the Yarmouth community that businesses and people and organizations want to help,” said Mayne.
As members of the town navigate this cut to food access, members of the Yarmouth Community Garden reflect on the value of producing local food for the community.
“In light of the cuts to SNAP benefits, I feel like the work that we do here and the produce that we contribute, is more important than ever. It feels very timely that we have this resource and that we have that ability to support the community through this resource,” said Fowler.
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