We have a large garden of raised beds that we use to grow veggies. We always make sure to grow extra so that we can donate a large amount for the community. At our old apartment, it was maybe 30 lbs or so of veggies and a lot of vegetable starts. Last year was our first year in our house and we easily did hundreds of pounds of vegetables, including tomatoes, zucchini, eggplant, carrots, hot peppers, bell peppers, and cucumbers. We hope to increase the variety this year to include some greens, other kinds of squash, and pumpkins.
We post the veggies on a number of local Facebook groups and we put the items out where they can easily be seen by folks when they come by. We're hoping to get a stand set up at some point to hold all the items.
We're selling items on this site to help with the expenses of the garden. It can get quite expensive to buy all the seeds, seedlings, soil (raised bed soil from Boring Bark), fertilizers, garden beds, water, etc needed for the plants. This helps to offset the cost so that we can donate more to the community. We're also hoping to add a few more beds this year, but we may have to wait since those can easily cost $250+/ea for a bed and the soil to fill it. We already have to buy more soil to account for settling in the beds we already have.
Hopefully next year we can get set up so that we can do seedlings again. This allows us to not only grow plants at a cheaper amount, but we get a greater variety and can offer seedlings to folks at cost (we also donate to non-profits). One year we donated several flats of seedlings to Metro East Web Academy for their students to grow.
Here's some pictures of our garden this last year and items donated:
