2009 ANNUAL REPORT

B.A.G. had a very good year, but we are at a crossroads for we have not raised sufficient funds for sustainability. Hayden Crilley, Co-Director for the past two years, is leaving us to pursue his own interests and economy. Hayden worked the retail salvage gleaning, while Oakes ran the farm gleaning (cross currents of course). The majority of the retail salvage was from Arlington Trader Joe’s, a portion from Wilsons Farm. Over the calendar year we salvaged over 50,000 pounds of produce, baked goods, and prepared meals, a better and more reliable source of food for low income people than the farm gleaning. Hayden has now turned over the Trader Joe’s operation to the Waltham Salvation Army, which runs both a meal program and a food pantry for needy people. He has now trained Trader Joe’s to separate out the trash from the food donations, which much improves the set-up. Often the store will donate over 400 pounds of acceptable produce and prepared foods a day! Aside from Waltham Salvation Army, we have been supplying the homeless families at the Gateway Motel at Alewife, now about 50 families, earlier in the year 75!

The writer, Oakes Plimpton, Co-director, has decided to persevere in pursuing our mission! Devoting windfall moneys to the cause, the old office at 240 Beaver Street, Waltham, one room on the 3rd floor of the old U/Mass Field Station overlooking Waltham Fields Community Farm, very reasonable rent, has been re-rented. And we will have an Intern, Laurie “Duck” Caldwell, to work part time writing grant applications, fund raising, contacting farmers and organizing volunteers, and generally trying to put B.A.G. on the map! Also I have offered to help the Salvation Army kitchen as I commute between Arlington (Trader Joes) and Waltham (the new office and Salvation Army), so we will still do some store salvage. I also bring salvage by the Gateway, and lately to public housing tenants in Arlington.

2009 FARM GLEANING

Here’s the story on farm gleaning, written back in December: — Winter has arrived! Eight degrees in our back yard 12/17, and then a snow storm. We really had a very good farm gleaning year. It started slowly with cool and wet early summer months resulting in 21 quarts of strawberries gleaned instead of over 200 the year before from Dick’s Market Garden in Lunenburg. But things picked up when Farmer Dave (David Dumaresq) alerted by a B.A.G. member, called us to offer native corn, as his successional plantings all became mature at once (result of the same cool and wet weather). We journeyed out to his Brok Farm in Dracut 5 times to harvest over 60 paper leaf compost bags (6 or 7 dozen ears each) to take back to Boston area shelters and pantries! See photo of Tufts orientation students trying out raw corn!

GORE PLACE: A cooperative arrangement with the Gore Place in Waltham worked out very well, with
Scott Clarke, Estate Manager, planting a whole acre of vegetables for our program! Our first harvesting was in July, to pick green beans (10 boxes), cabbage (12) and turnips (6), followed by harvesting a half an acre of Waltham butternut squash (54 boxes!) and sugar pumpkins (12) in late September and October. All this was from their Watertown field. Closer to the Estate and the farmhouse, Scott planted collards, mustard greens and another planting of green beans which we also harvested mostly in October (respectively 15, 5 & 6 boxes). I attach a photo of the Gore green bean gleaning along with our delivery to the Medford food pantry.

Then in late AUGUST, again alerted by a B.A.G. member, Adam Horowitz, who runs the General Store in Harvard and also owns a small peach orchard, offered us the majority of his 30 tree orchard to glean! His commercial arrangements had fallen through. We journeyed out there six times to harvest over 3,000 pounds of peaches! We had already gleaned some peaches from Steve Violette’s peach orchard in Lunenburg, and later in the fall we gleaned apples from Nicewicz and Kimball fruit orchards. Also we were offered the pick of Little Rascals apple orchard in Harvard (a new u-pick operation perhaps only 20% picked), but we found the apples frozen on our 2nd trip, an early frost. Counting apples taken from bins, we delivered around two hundred boxes (approx. 50 pounds a box) to Food For Free, Salvation Army (Waltham and Cambridge), Rosie’s Place, Pine Street Inn, CASPAR, Sandra’s Lodge, the Red Cross food pantry, Helping Hand in Cambridge, the Medford food pantry, and to Bread and Loaves food pantry at Fort Devens.

FARMERS MARKET: During the farmers market season, as in prior years, we collected produce seconds from the Arlington Market, and in August, when the corn, tomatoes and fruit come in, assisted the Town Human Services in establishing a Seconds Market at the Public Housing where produce is purveyed at $1 a large grocery bag (reduced from $2, the fee paying for Housing residents to manage the Market), as many as 40 or more families attending.

NOVEMBER: is a good gleaning month, and I usually ask around after the Halloween weekend, for most farmers’ markets and farmstands close then, and often farmers do not bother trying to market what’s left out there. Steen Benson of Great Oak Organic Farm in Berlin invited us out after the Arlington Market closed. Our crews went out twice to glean 15 large plastic bags of regular kale, 4 of Russian kale, 9 boxes of chard, 10 lettuce, 1 each of broccoli and brussel sprouts. I delivered some of the kale directly to the Senior Association of a Cambridge-based Portugese-American agency, enthusiastically received!
Brigham Farm in Concord has offered their left over lettuce several years now, so I called the farmer Chip to ask, and he said we could so harvest (a lot planted too late) and also some of his pink cauliflower. I checked it out to find rows of very nice red and green Boston and Romaine lettuce, and into December we picked it! He had protected some rows with Remay. We picked some 40 boxes (could have picked double!) plus 4 boxes of the pink cauliflower (made signs it was like purple cabbage, perfectly edible in other words). I called Brian, farm manager of Hutchins organic farm along the shores of the Concord River, and he offered a patch of collards, kale, cabbage and beets. Then to my surprise the Food Project farmers called to offer their fields for the gleaning, and we went out to those fertile fields a number of times, once with 12 volunteers, another time with kids from the Haley House in Roxbury. In all we harvested 41 large plastic bags of collards, 9 of various greens, 4 cabbages, 10 boxes of beets, 9 of carrots, 3 of turnips and rutabagas.

DECEMBER too! December 3rd checked out an offer by Steve Violette of Dick’s Market Garden to let us glean a field of largely unpicked broccoli, which matured too late. Nice heads, and I picked 11 boxes. A week later returned with 3 volunteers to pick 20 boxes! Then a board member of Landsake Farm in Weston contacted us to let us know a lot of produce was left out there in their fields, especially the Green Power field near the Lincoln line. That received an OK from the farm manager, and we gleaned 14 large bags of regular kale, 6 Tuscan kale, 4 boxes of chard, and 8 of cabbage, 3 kohlrabi.

TOTALS:
We estimated we gleaned approximately 22,250 pounds from area farms, all delivered to food pantries and shelters, and received an additional 11,350 pounds produce donations from farmers, the majority at the Arlington Farmers Market, also delivered to charity or to the Seconds market at the Town Public Housing where purveyed at one dollar per bag.
In addition, we salvaged over 50,000 pounds of meat, produce, and bread from Trader Joe’s in Arlington, MA., and Wilsons Farms in Lexington, MA.

Oakes Plimpton, Director