Dear Kitchen Gardener,

For many of us, this is the time of year for reflecting on, celebrating, and feeling thankful for the year's harvest.  If you are lucky, you not only enjoyed some of the best and most flavorful food that nature has to offer this past growing season, but are still enjoying it either through an extended season, a root cellar, or through whatever canning or preserving you might do. 

It should also be a time, however, for thinking about those who are not partaking of the feast, those who have been left out or marginalized, and others whose voice is too soft to be heard at society's dinner table.  This message hit home to me last month after sending out the October newsletter.  I received the following short, polite reply from the Rev. Renis Morian of Guyana, South America:

"Some people are doing this (kitchen gardening) for pleasure but here in Guyana, I have just launched a poverty reduction project to help 300 families.  Here it's not about fun, it's about human survival."

Rev. Morian went on to ask if KGI could help secure a seed donation for his project.  Well, as you can imagine, I felt called to duty by "higher powers".  As a start-up effort ourselves, we're not as well resourced as we'd like to be.  We are, though, rich in terms of our ideas and contacts.  A few days and e-mails later, KGI had secured $300 worth of donated seed from Territorial Seed Company which we will be sending down to our friends in Guyana later this week (thank you Josh and Lori at Territorial for making that happen!).

The more of this work I do, the more I see how much work there is to be done.  Some might feel discouraged by that realization, but the positive flipside is that there is no shortage of ways that we, together and as individuals, can have a positive influence on the food system, whether it's thousands of miles away or in our own backyard.

Much closer to home, I've recently seen all the good that can come when a group of people put their mind to something.  Earlier this year, I was talking with Deb McDonough who lives in my neighborhood, is a KGI member, and helped organize our neighborhood Kitchen Garden Day celebration this past year.  We're both "can do" type people, so much that we tend to take on so many things that we end up becoming "can't do" people.  In a "can do" moment, though, we put our heads together and agreed that it was time that our local elementary school had a kitchen garden. 

The problem was that neither of us felt we could afford to be the driving force behind yet another time-hungry project.  Still, we knew that it was the right thing to do and that, time or no time, we were probably as (un)qualified as anyone else to launch it.  What followed might aptly be called a pint-sized miracle.  While both of our us were bracing to push the bureaucratic equivalent of a boulder up a hill, we suddenly realized that it wasn't a boulder but a well-packed snowball and that, without knowing it, we were already on top of the hill!  All that was needed was to give the ball a push down. 

Within the first days of proposing the idea, we had found an enthusiastic and diplomatic teacher who offered to be the project's in-house champion.  Within a month, we had a group of over 20 families who were prepared to help out in some way either by volunteering time or contributing materials.  Within six weeks, we had organized two work parties for preparing the ground and building a raised-bed garden .  And within two months, the kids were out in their new garden spreading straw on the walkways, planting garlic (see photos above), and making plans for a garlic-bread feast.  If that isn't the snowball effect, I don't what is. 

Victor Hugo once wrote that there is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.  On its better days, I like to think that Kitchen Gardeners International is an organization whose time has come.  I'm hoping that you'll agree and find some way of joining us in the days, weeks, and months ahead. 

Together, we can bring more people to the table.

Happy Thanksgiving,