The Charlevoix Area Garden Club has created a Vegetable Garden to Provide Food for Our Community.
One of the 2023-2025 National Garden Club President’s projects is a campaign to help feed the hungry across America. Called Plant America-Feed America the project encourages members to participate in one of several ways to help fight food insecurity. The Michigan Garden Clubs has offered further resources to help member clubs get started and branded the initiative “Gardening with Purpose”.
The Charlevoix Area Garden Club has taken on this challenge. In May 2024 we planted our first Community Vegetable Garden as a part of the Plant America – Feed America campaign with the intention of growing fresh produce to be donated to the Charlevoix Community Food Pantry.
Fighting chronic hunger in America is an ongoing problem. According to latest statistics from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, 33.8 million people in America are food insecure – 5 million of them are children. More families are showing up at food banks to ask for help. Even our elderly population on a fixed income suffer from a lack of nutritious food.
Taking on a new project can be a strain on a garden club. Prior to adding the Community Vegetable Garden, our club was maintaining eight Civic Gardens in Charlevoix, however our members felt that this was an important initiative. We also wanted to try our hand at producing food – and hopefully encourage other members of our community to participate in this effort.
How it Went and What We Learned
We decided to start small and learn what crops worked best so that we could maximize our future food donations. We secured two 24 x 24 foot plots in the City of Charlevoix Community Garden – located off of State Street (near the airport). These plots are available for residents of our community and water is provided on-site. Gardeners must provide their own deer protection – so we installed a temporary deer fence to prevent our crops from becoming a buffet for wildlife.
We wanted to grow our crops without the use of herbicides, pesticides, and inorganic fertilizers, so our first task was adding organic matter (composted manure and clean straw) to the soil to improve the soil texture and mineral content. We found that due to annual tilling, the texture of the soil has become quite fine and tends to clump into clay-like balls when wet. The soil amendments helped, but we realized that root vegetables (carrots, radish, potatoes) may have a hard time in this soil.
The crops we planted this year were: snow peas, pole beans, kale, zucchini, tomatoes, bell peppers, winter squash (honeynut). We also planted annual flowers (zinnia, cosmos, sweet alyssum, nasturtium, and marigolds) to attract pollinators, trap pests, and act as living mulch for our crops. This was also part of our experiment with companion planting.
The garden was generally a success. We used donated materials for the fencing and weed mat. The cost to the Garden Club for soil amendments, plants, and signage was $174.81. We donated over 125 pounds of fresh produce to the food pantry and it was gratefully received. Some crops definitely did better than others, but we will use that knowledge to better plan for next season.
What worked:
Green beans: We planted one variety of beans - Seychelles pole beans. They were planted in one row with a trellis fence as support. They had a great yield and continue to set new pods as they are picked. They were one of the first crops to mature (mid July) and the last to be harvested (late September). The zinnias planted in the row adjacent to the beans mostly kept the Japanese Beetles off of the crop, and the Sweet Alyssum planted at the base of the bean plants did a good job acting as living mulch (keeping the weeds down).
Tomatoes: Several varieties of tomatoes were planted. The Black Cherry, Cherokee Purple, and Roma were the biggest producers. We inter-planted marigolds among the tomatoes as an experiment in companion planting. Marigolds can both deter pests (whiteflies and nematodes) and attract beneficial insects (bees and ladybugs). Tomatoes need pollination to produce fruit, so attracting bees is vital.
Bell peppers: We only put in a few plants, but they really liked the amount of sun in the community garden plots. We interplanted with nasturtiums – which are a good pollinator attractor and living mulch (although they can really sprawl and take over if not cut back).
What didn’t work:
Zucchini: The plants started out strong, but succumbed to powdery mildew and stopped producing. We ended up pulling the plants out in July. We also realized that the Food Pantry gets plenty of zucchini donations, so this doesn’t seem like a crop worth repeating.
Snow peas: The conditions in the garden may be too sunny and hot for these plants, and they didn’t end up producing very much. They also came down with a bad case of powdery mildew early, so we took them out and put in a row of radicchio in July.
What could be done better and plans for next season:
The Honeynut winter squash did fairly well, but in hopes of improving both the quality of the crop and the yield, we are planning to grow it up welded wire arches next season. This will keep the vines off of the ground and should help give the plants some disease protection. By creating a tunnel of squash we would have a shaded row for planting leafy greens (lettuce, arugula, spinach) that wouldn’t tolerate amount of sun that the garden receives.
We used a woven weed mat between the crop rows. Next season we will use more. Weeds are a massive problem in the plots and weeding between crops in the hot sun is not fun (but necessary because we did not use herbicides).
If we expand the garden and eliminate the crops that didn’t work well, we can add a few others. We are considering cabbage as well as a couple of root vegetables (carrots, radish, onions) if we create some raised beds with better soil.
We’re looking forward to next year, and a new growing season. Hopefully the lessons we learned will pay off and we will be able to produce more with less work. We also hope to encourage more members of our community to grow food and to donate their excess to the Charlevoix Community Food Pantry.
If you don’t have garden space on your own property, there are quite a few unused plots in the Charlevoix Community Garden. To find out more about securing a space go to: https://www.charlevoixmi.gov/230/Garden-Plots
Comments