John Curtis launched Giving Gardens two years ago in an effort to make fresh produce available to everyone in the Macomb community.
The organization has six public access gardens around town, with the newest ones at Eisenhower Tower and Lincoln Elementary School. The gardens are surrounded by deer fencing, but are completely open to the public.
This time of year, the flowers are in bloom and tomatoes are starting to ripen.
“We’ve set up our public access gardens so that anyone from the community can come in and harvest anything that’s available,” Curtis said.
Giving Gardens focuses on planting vegetables with multiple yields. For example, kale can have the leaves harvested, and then it will grow new leaves. Tomatoes, peppers, and squash also meet these criteria, along with berry bushes.
Flowers such as zinnias, sunflowers, and daisies are grown for community members to pick and put in vases, but they serve another purpose: they support local pollinators and birds.
Giving Gardens also battles food insecurity by helping community members start their own gardens with a seed exchange and a gardening workshop in the spring.
Curtis said they give away thousands of seedlings a year to community members for their own gardens and are working on building a video curriculum to help support new gardeners.
“This year we’re really taking on providing fresh produce for food pantries,” Curtis said. “Right now, we have a crew of people at the seventh garden, which is based on my farm, harvesting produce to take to the food pantry.”
Out at his farm, an AmeriCorps Fellow was in a greenhouse removing snap pea plants that were done producing for the year and replacing them with zucchini plants. Another volunteer was packaging kale and pole beans for the Good Food Pantry and the Macomb Food Co-op.
“Everybody struggles with including quality food in your diet,” Curtis said. “When that food is much more expensive if you’re income challenged at all, it is very hard to purchase fresh ingredients.”
The pantry that Giving Gardens takes produce to is the Good Food Pantry. It is a part of the Western Illinois Regional Council and is working to help curb food insecurity in McDonough County.
“Unfortunately, the demand for this type of program is high. There is a lot of food insecurity in McDonough County,” said Jamie Roth, the Community Services and Public Relations Director for WIRC.
"Poverty doesn't discriminate."
900 households are currently registered with the pantry. 35 percent of the people the pantry serves are children, and 25 percent are senior citizens.
“We serve the whole range. We’ve got middle aged working people, we have people with children, people without children, we have senior citizens,” Roth said.
The Good Food Pantry is a free-choice pantry, set up like a miniature grocery store. Registered households can go to the pantry once a month to choose foods that fit their needs and preferences.
It is open Tuesdays and Thursdays from 2 p.m. to 5 p.m.
In addition to shelf-stable foods such as boxed and canned goods, the pantry also strives to help people put fresh fruits and vegetables in their diet. Giving Gardens helps with their donations, but the Good Food Pantry has their own garden as well called the Good Food Garden.
The pantry also accepts donations from local farmers and gardeners with excess produce.
The Good Food Pantry started out as the Good Food Collaborative. The organization delivered boxes of groceries to homes during the pandemic.
Now, at the store, volunteers – including Chris Adamski, Nancy Rutledge, and Pam McLean -- help shoppers select food.
“I volunteered because I had retired from WIU and was looking for something to do. Something meaningful,” said Adamski.
“I really like the setup of this because people not only pick their food but I get to know the people a little bit better.”
McLean exchanges recipes with shoppers, especially recipes that include items found at the pantry. She’ll learn a new recipe, and then share one of her own if she has it.
Other food pantries in Macomb include The Crossing Food Pantry, the First Christian Church Emergency Cupboard, the Salvation Army Food Pantry, and the Western Illinois University Food Pantry.
The Macomb Loaves & Fishes Pantry will temporarily suspend service on July 31 due to a lack of funding.
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