It’s time to get our hands dirty.

One of the many gleaning garden beds outside of Roots Zero Waste Market, the site of this Saturday’s fall planting workshop!

I’ve been working in the local food movement for a long time. As a journalist, a spectator on the scene, I watched the local food movement from a distance. I quickly became dissatisfied with its progress and joined in as a participant, opening and managing farmers markets in food deserts. After a time, I again became frustrated with the barriers those markets present when they’re not fully coordinated with the communities they serve, when they become more like PR stunts than authentic cornerstones of health and community.

While watching the leaders in local food preach to the choir of their supporters, I began seeking out ways to expand the base, to get more people to buy into local food. For the first time in my life, I realized that wasn’t going to be through words. In order to build a movement like this, we need to actually build gardens. I do believe that if everyone in my city had a vegetable garden, one as small as four feet by four feet, the way they see food would change, and the way we treat the people who grow it would shift in a way it hasn’t for almost a century.

I believe that kitchen gardens can have a ripple effect beyond all imagination. As I’ve written about before, gardening impacts our mental health, our relationship to our neighbors and our environment. It also has impacts the way we view food. When we spend months tending to a single melon on a vine, we have more appreciation for the farmers who have made growing food their life’s work. All of that effort teaches us how to appreciate food in a way that seeing dozens of perfect fruit from all over the world in the grocery store doesn’t. It connects us to something more than food, it connects us to the community around us that grows it.

My goal for Gold Feather Gardens is to be a business that subscribes to the buy-one-give-one model. I believe that everyone has a right to participate and benefit from the food-growing process. That’s why I’m partnering with Roots Zero Waste market for a fall planting workshop. Roots has more than 100 square feet of raised beds in their parking lot from where members of the community are encouraged to glean fresh produce. They planted these beds in the spring and had an amazingly bountiful harvest all summer long. Now, it’s time to turn these beds over for fall, and I need your help.

This Saturday, I’ll be at Roots with plants from North End Organic Nursery. I’ll walk you through the process of removing warm season plants like tomatoes and peppers, amending the soil with natural compost and planting cool season plants like carrots, lettuces and cabbage. If you thought you could only garden in the summertime in Boise, this is where you’ll learn how to take your garden into the next season. The literal fruits of our labor will directly benefit the community around Roots who rely on these beds for fresh food when they otherwise don’t have the means or access to it.

Together we can further the local food movement in Boise simply by planting a seed. I hope you’ll join me. Space is limited for social distancing, so reserve your spot today by clicking this link.