Loose Leaf Notes

The following was published in the Floyd Press newspaper on April 19, 2012

An early evening celebration of the new growing season took place recently at Plenty! headquarters on Webbs Mill Road, where the group’s office, food bank and community garden are located.  Recent food project developments and partnerships, including a new freezer, a new intern and a visit from a volunteer ministry group, were also reasons for celebration.

Twelve members of Commissioned by Christ, an independent Catholic organization from Northern Virginia, were in town for the weekend working on Plenty! initiatives. Jessica Berrada, president and CEO of the non-profit, said she and other volunteers had been weeding in the community garden earlier in the day.  They also prepared vegetable beds for the Kids’ Wonder Gardens at Floyd and Willis Elementary Schools.

“We do short term ministry projects.  We mostly make international trips. Last year we went to the Dominican Republic and Peru and we’re going to Jamaica next spring,” Berrada said.  The missionary volunteers were being housed by parishioners of Floyd’s All Saints Catholic Church.

Plenty!’s new intern, Ananda Underhill (pictured on the left in the first photo with Coolidge and Bressler) a social work student from Radford University, was on hand to talk with attendees. Underhill will be helping to organize people and paperwork through July.  “I’d like to get a gleaning team together that can be on-call,” she said, explaining that after the farmers have harvested their crops, a team can go in and take what was left.   “I want to get more teens involved,” she added.

Last year’s intern, Alexis Bressler, was also in attendance.  Bressler still coordinates community and school garden projects. She became familiar with Plenty! founders McCabe Coolidge and Karen Day when the couple spoke at a Virginia Tech “Civic Agriculture and Food Systems” class that Bressler was in.  Bressler was impressed with Plenty!’s community based model, where neighbors get to know each other and share with each other.

The neighbor-to-neighbor people that Plenty! serves continues to increase, Coolidge said.   He reported that throughout the winter the group supplied mostly rice, beans, pasta and peanut butter to four church pantries in the county.  “We want to give them more produce,” he said, noting that fresh fruits and vegetables are so important for good health.

But the availability of fresh produce donations has been unpredictable, which is why Plenty! has partnered with Adam Bresa and Darbi Jewell of Crescent Farm (pictured above).   Bresa and Jewell recently moved to county from Green Bay Virginia, where they did market farming and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) work.  They will be providing some fresh produce to Plenty!, as well as growing wholesale produce for Good Food Good People, a Floyd-based retail and wholesale distributor of farm fresh products that links regional farmers and consumers within a 100 mile radius.

As the evening sun set, people tapped to the lively beat of the Porch Loungers, a Blacksburg-based band that played on the Food Bank porch.  Attendees mingled, toured the Plenty! site and enjoyed good food and conversation.  ~ Colleen Redman

Post notes: Wildfire Pots by Plenty! co-founder McCabe Coolidge are pictured on display in photo #5.  Read about Plenty!’s Community Garden HERE.