harvest walkabout: part one
Our neighborhood’s first annual harvest walkabout was this past Saturday. It came at the suggestion of my neighbor, Wilma, who really liked the holiday walkabout I conceived last December. What is a harvest walkabout, you ask? Well, let me tell you!
The idea was to build community by sharing our backyard garden harvests and the timing with 9/11 was very prescient (in hindsight, of course, as we selected the date in February or March). Little did we know then that we’d end up having a chilly summer in Northern California. As a result, there wasn’t much garden produce to share with neighbors. But I thought the small harvest was actually a great teaching moment for our children: you share what you have, even if there isn’t much. And on the anniversary of something so terrible, it felt right to reaffirm our commitment to building community with a physical manifestation of kindness and brotherhood.
We are tremendously lucky in Silicon Valley not to have the type of hunger issues that are prevalent in many parts of the world. And the opportunity to illustrate a role we can play locally proved irresistible (to me, most of all). Neighbors were encouraged to share what they could (placed on tables, baskets, or blankets on one’s driveway) and we pledged to donate any excess to our local shelter via Full Circle Farm, whose volunteers coordinate a weekly delivery of extra produce that they grow [http://fullcirclesunnyvale.org/]. The ‘walkabout’ portion consisted of neighbors walking around our streets with bags or baskets, collecting produce for dinner or other meals. I was thrilled by how many of our senior neighborhood members turned out, as well as many families with young children.
My own children helped me so much… thank you, Dane and Tate! Dane assisted with our family’s harvest, shown in the photos below. He wasn’t able to participate in the walkabout due to a boy scout commitment but was there for the kick-off in our driveway. Tate enjoyed biking with his best friend, Alex, sampling lemonade and fresh cookies at some of the refreshment stops, and going on a slight produce bender near the end: devouring my friend, Nina’s, delicious appetizer of halved cherry tomatoes stuffed with feta, basil and balsamic (Tate says he ate at least ten, maybe more). My sweet husband, Paul, held down the fort on our driveway so I could walk around with the main crowd. Thanks, babe!
We were honored to have one of the Full Circle Farm board members (pediatrician Keith Fabisiak) and representatives from the Sunnyvale SUN (Jacqueline and John) accompany us.
I wrote a full wrap-up for the neighborhood Yahoo group yesterday and plan to share excerpts tomorrow… stay tuned!
