Victory Gardeners Hold Harvest Home Festival

By Andrew Gorosko

To celebrate a successful harvest this growing season at the town’s Victory Garden at Fairfield Hills, as well as to socialize and to make plans for the next growing season, participants in the civic program met Sunday, September 25, for the Harvest Home Festival next to the garden.

The Victory Garden project allows volunteers to grow vegetable crops for free distribution to groups including FAITH Food Pantry, the town social services department’s food pantry, and residents at the Nunnawauk Meadows elderly housing complex, explained garden organizer Harvey Pessin.

Gardeners also grew herbs and flowering plants during the first growing season this year, Mr Pessin said.

Mr Pessin, who is a landscape designer, said that the Victory Garden, so far this season, has yielded more than 2,800 pounds of crops for recipients.

The town’s Parks and Recreation Department prepared the town land for planting. The 10,000-square-foot plot contains 34 individual garden rows, which are maintained by individual groups of volunteer gardeners. Tomatoes and peppers were among the most popular crops this season.

The gardeners who tend to their individual rows deliver their crops to the recipients of the harvest free of charge.

Mr Pessin estimated that about 150 people participated in the Victory Garden project this year. Among the groups that maintained garden rows were various town agencies and local businesses.

Besides the direct benefit that the recipients gain from food donations, the Victory Garden project has provided the gardeners with socialization opportunities, Mr Pessin said.

“It’s a unique leisure activity” that provides people of all ages with recreation, he said. “It’s a ‘green’ project,” he added.

The program started in June. In the future, gardening at the plot could start as early as March, he said.

Mr Pessin said that to get the project underway this year, Planters’ Choice, LLC, a local wholesale nursery, donated 900 young plants, of which 600 were tomato plants.

Local grower Jim Shortt of Shortt’s Farm & Garden Center serves as an adviser to the Victory Garden.

Information on the Victory Garden project is available on the group’s website, www.foodpantrygarden.org.