Hatfield board honors local gardeners

By DAN SOKIL

HATFIELD TWP. — A group of local gardeners have earned a high honor from Hatfield Township.

On Wednesday night, the township’s board of commissioners recognized SUN (Seeds Used for Nutrition) a citizen group who put its time in the township’s community garden to good use last year.

“These Hatfield Township residents gave their thoughts, time and resources last year to garden one of the community garden plots for the purpose of growing fresh food for people in need,” said commissioners President Tom Zipfel.

“Their twenty by twenty foot plot totalled 146 pounds of food: 11 different kinds of vegetables and 11 kinds of herbs, and they harvested it and delivered it all to local churches and food cupboards,” he said.

They did their gardening in the township’s Community Garden, located on a two-and-a-half acre plot near Clemens and Fairgrounds roads that the Clemens Family Corporation has allowed the township’s Parks Department to convert into plots gardeners can rent from the township.

Those residents in the SUN group were each honored by name Wednesday night: Ron and Sandie Musoleno, Linda and Chuck Arkans, Mark Baskin, Ryan Gober and Tamara Shaffer, and each beamed as Zipfel told the public about another honor the gardening group has earned.

According to Zipfel, the group has applied to the regional Health Promotion Council for grant funding as part of the council’s Cultivating Communities initiative, which could lead to grant funding for the group.

The Health Promotion Council has elected this garden to be one of half a dozen gardens in the Indian Valley and North Penn area to be showcased as part of that initiative, Zipfel said, thus the honor by the board.

“That was a really nice use of not only our community garden, but also to help our community generally,” he said.

Those gardens will partner with HPC, the Montgomery County Health Department, the Penn State Cooperative Extension, and the Food Trust through their Community Nutrition Coalition, an initiative that’s being funded by the North Penn Community Health Foundation, according to HPC program manager Courtney Grove.

“What we’re working on is trying to develop up to 24 community gardens over the next two years, and link them back to food distribution sites that are providing food to populations in need,” Grove said.

For example, while the Hatfield gardeners donated much of their produce to local churches last year, the network would be able to coordinate and identify which community gardens have the most produce available and which pantries have the biggest need - while offering nutrition information and gardening tips through the cooperative and health department.

“If a garden site links up to us and has excess produce, say we’re giving to Manna on Main Street and Manna already has enough, we can connect to the network and find another who needs produce,” she said.

“We’re planning to do interviews with some larger farmers this spring to get ideas from them on what might work, what might not, and what kind of incentives we can come up with to participate,” Grove said.

For more information on the Health Promotion Council, visit www.PHMC.org. 

From Sokil, Dan. (2012, Feb. 10). Hatfield board honors local gardeners. The Reporter. Retrieved from:  http://www.thereporteronline.com/article/20120210/NEWS01/120219975/hatfield-board-honors-local-gardeners&pager=full_story