2024 Read for Seeds Update
Much like worms play a vital role on the farm, so do bookworms in the region who participate each spring in the Read for Seeds program at Gaining Ground! 📚🪱
These young readers sign up to strenghten their literacy skills—and they raise funds with each page they complete for one of the most important things on the farm: seeds!
This year, the result has been record-setting...
We are thrilled to share a fun, meaningful update that Farmer Avery (also our Volunteer and Outreach Manager) provided to students, letting them know the total amount they generated for our hunger relief mission—with dontions still coming in!
Special thanks to the following classes for helping us promote food security in Eastern Massachusetts:
🌱 2nd Grade - Alcott Elementary School
🌱 2nd Grade - Belmont Day School
🌱 4th & 5th Grades - Fenn School
🌱 2nd Grade - Nashoba Brooks School
🌱 6th Grade - Tenacre Country Day School
🌱 3rd & 5th Grades - Thoreau Elementary School
We are so impressed with your reading and community care!
2023 was a season of abundance at Gaining Ground, from harvest and volunteer turnout to impact and fundraising. That's because of you, our amazing community of supporters and partners.
Thank you!
Your generous contributions of time, talent, and treasure, make it possible for Gaining Ground to farm as we do, exclusively to promote food security.
For more details on the season, please take a few moments to read this reflection from our Operations Director Allison Goodwin: https://gainingground.org/celebrating-your-impact/
Here's to another nourishing year!
Read for Seeds with Belmont Day School
This week, the farmers have been in the greenhouse, seeding up trays of celery, bok choy, beets, cucumbers, kohlrabi, lettuce, celeriac, and napa cabbage.
And—speaking of seeds—the second graders at Belmont Day School are now one week into their read-a-thon in support of Gaining Ground! We’re so grateful to these dedicated students, who by collecting pledges for the pages they read, support our Read for Seeds campaign.
Every year, young readers—including those at Belmont Day School—help cover 70 percent of our seed budget and make it possible for us to grow over 100,000 pounds of vegetables, which we donate to food pantries and meal programs.
To learn more about Read for Seeds, follow the link below.
https://gainingground.org/make-a-difference-while-home-read-for-seeds-to-fight-hunger/
Welcome spring!
The #vernal #equinox arrives today at 5:24pm.
As #spring begins and our days grow longer than our nights, we know the intensity and excitement on the farm will be increasing as well.
We are thrilled to start getting more and more plants growing in the soil—and that in only a few short weeks we will welcome #volunteers back in the fields with us!
Read for Seeds with Gaining Ground
It’s not quite time to start seeding in the greenhouse, but it is definitely time to start thinking about Read for Seeds, our annual read-a-thon in which participants collect pledges based on the number of pages they read.
All proceeds raised from Read for Seeds support Gaining Ground and the kids who take part in this program raise 70 percent of our annual seed budget!
If you or your school would like to learn more about taking part, visit the link below or contact us at [email protected].
The money you raise will help us buy seeds to grow the vegetables that we give away for free to food pantries and meal programs, feeding families in need of fresh, healthy food.
https://gainingground.org/make-a-difference-while-home-read-for-seeds-to-fight-hunger/
Until recently, these beds were growing parsley, beets, salanova, scallions, kohlrabi, bok choy, napa cabbage, and cilantro. Now, with the harvests of these crops completed and winter approaching, we’re switching over to cover crops.
Farmers Anna, Kari, and Chrissie have been preparing the beds—and putting down lots of fresh compost—before seeding winter rye and crimson clover. These cover crops are winter hardy, which means they’ll put down sturdy roots now, go dormant at the height of winter, and then resume growing in the spring.
By overwintering our fields with these cover crops, we prevent soil erosion and compaction, suppress weeds, and improve the soil’s fertility by increasing its organic matter content.
#covercrops #farming #winterprep
This seems fast in time-lapse, but it was fast in real-time as well!
Farmers Erin, Chrissie, and Kari zipped along this week, getting these 18 beds fertilized, tilthed, and planted. Kari used the paper pot to transplant Sierra Blanca, Ailsa Craig, Cabernet, and Patterson onions, which all started out in the greenhouse.
The onions will be growing in these beds until the end of July—a reminder of just how much activity the fields here will see in the weeks to come!
#spring #onions #farming
Our farmers crisscross Concord in February, tapping the maple trees from which we harvest the sap for our maple syrup.
Here’s a peek at the work they do to prepare the taps and sap buckets.
Nearly all of the trees we tap are privately owned, and our neighbors graciously allow us to harvest their sap for syrup that we give away for free to folks without access to enough to eat.
We’re grateful for their generosity.
Thank you, as well, to Tony Rinaldo for his photography and videography of this process.
Sap flow is determined by the weather, and the warm days we’ve been having mean the farmers have been collecting and boiling a lot this week.
When it comes from the tree, maple sap is approximately two percent sugar. When the syrup is finished, it is 67 percent sugar.
To make this transformation possible, Farmers Chrissie, Erin, and Anna were busy at the evaporator yesterday, managing the fire, checking the bubbling sap, and pouring out some beautiful, dark batches of nearly-finished syrup.
#maplesyrup #concordma
As we celebrate the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. today, we are thrilled to take part in this project with the Concord Museum, which asks us to “consider how we live in concert with others and, most crucially, to confront whether our actions bring justice to others or harden the many injustices in our world.”
Along with two other fantastic local organizations—The Robbins House and Harlem Lacrosse—we were grateful to be a part of this conversation around Concord and the ongoing legacy of the civil rights movement. Enjoy this video featuring Jennifer Johnson, Gaining Ground’s executive director, exploring the key role of equitable access to nutritious food within the greater movement for social justice.
To learn more about this project, follow this link: https://mailchi.mp/concordmuseum/mlkday-1475142?e=[UNIQID]
Thank you to the Cummings Foundation for your generous investment in our work. And for sharing this video, featuring Bill Cummings, with a message of gratitude from our farm staff at Gaining Ground.
The funding from this grant will help to strengthen and expand our efforts to grow high-quality produce, serve the needs of our recipient partners, and provide meaningful experiences for the many volunteers who contribute to the farm’s work!
#CummingsGrant
We are so grateful to the students at Belmont Day School, Thoreau Elementary School, Tenacre Country Day School, and Raymond J. Fisher Middle School (over in Los Gatos, California), who participated in Read for Seeds this year.
Through their hard work and dedication to reading, they raised more than $10,000 toward our annual seed budget!
This generous support helps us serve our mission of growing fresh, delicious vegetables for our neighbors without enough to eat.
As a showing of our appreciation, here is a sneak peak at what's growing at the farm this summer thanks to the hard work of our Read for Seeds participants!
Well, we’ve started all that sap, and now we’re going to finish it!
Check out Farmer Anna walking us through the process of how to finish our maple syrup. 🍁 (It’ll make you ready for pancakes and waffles.)
And all the food chemists out there can join us in brushing up on our specific gravity measures!
#maplesyrup
The farmers transfer freshly collected maple sap from the truck into our sugarhouse tank, where it will flow into the evaporator and transform -- over many hours of boiling -- into syrup. A good New England workout! #teamwork #winterharvest #sugaring
More snow! The farmers have their hands full clearing all of this precipitation from our hoop houses and pathways, but it sure is pretty.
