Urban Harvest Receives Oklahoma Sierra Club Award
April 7, 2010
OKLAHOMA CITY - Bruce Edwards, Urban Harvest director at the Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma, was recently honored by the Sierra Club with the Earth Care Award for running an environmentally-conscious program.
Urban Harvest is designed to make fresh fruits and vegetables more readily available to hungry Oklahomans. This agricultural program helps organize and sustain community gardens, helps local growers get excess and unsold produce to those in need, and teaches Oklahomans sustainable gardening techniques through demonstration gardens and 28 community garden sites.
“Urban Harvest strives to practice and teach as it goes about the daily task of fighting hunger in a sustainable way,” said Edwards. “It’s an honor to be recognized for the Regional Food Bank’s emergency food operations efforts to recycle cans, boxes, produce and frozen foods.”
Urban Harvest also maintains a variety of gardens and gardening related activities at the Regional Food Bank. This consists of an edible landscape, demonstration community garden, orchards, organic vegetable gardens, two greenhouses and a season extension hoop house. The gardens are used to teach organic and sustainable growing techniques for the homeowner or small local market grower. Produce grown is either sold to finance the program or sent to the Regional Food Bank’s partner agency food pantries. Additionally, crop gleaning efforts have traditionally diverted unsold produce grown by local and state wide growers to the Regional Food Bank to distribute to partner agencies.
The Urban Harvest program practices the following:
- Soil conservation through crop rotations, less tilling, and seasonal cover cropping of fallow soils.
- Soil building through intensive composting of donated soiled straw, leaves gathered from community curbs, and spoiled produce that cannot be delivered to partner agencies.
- Worm composting that turns garbage into high quality plant and soil food used in the Urban Harvest gardens and sold to the public to help fund the program.
- Water conservation through timed and drip irrigation cuts down on how much water is lost to evaporation and decreases weedy areas in the garden.
- Aquaponic growing systems in the greenhouse to grow tilapia and produce using the same water in a circulating system.
- Stacking strawberry pots used to grow four times the amount of strawberries in a traditional ground garden, which cuts water use by more than half and produces no waste.
- Passive heating is used in one greenhouse by building compost piles inside to grow cold weather sensitive plants year round.
- Edible landscapes are practiced and taught to teach the community how to grow food in their garden beds.
- Bee hives, owl stands, bat boxes and other systems attract wildlife that help protect our gardens from predators while providing support for wild life systems in the Regional Food Bank area.
- Salvaged materials are recycled into various structures to cut down.
Urban Harvest also hosts educational workshops on subjects like community gardening, organic gardening techniques, drip irrigation, season extension, and compost. For more information, contact Bruce Edwards at 405.604.7108 or at bedwards@regionalfoodbank.org. To learn more about the Regional Food Bank, call 405.972.1111 or visit regionalfoodbank.org.
The Regional Food Bank of Oklahoma is a private, 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization that acts as a link through which the food industry and community may donate food and other goods. The products are then distributed to nearly 700 schools and charitable feeding programs in 53 central and western Oklahoma counties. In the last fiscal year, the Food Bank distributed 28.5 million pounds of food and product to help the charitable community effectively feed people in need. Since its inception in 1980, the Food Bank has distributed more than 321 million pounds of food to feed Oklahoma’s hungry.
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