(Radio Iowa) – A new statewide initiative is being launched that will help support community gardens that donate fresh produce. The Iowa Donation Garden Network is designed to reach and link up garden organizers through expert-led education, shared resources and collaborative programming. Alicia Herzog, the Iowa Master Gardener program manager with I-S-U Extension and Outreach, explains how it’ll work. “The overarching goal of this network is to empower and connect community donation gardens across Iowa,” Herzog says. “It can feel like you’re an island, sometimes, trying to do this work of raising fresh produce to be donated to food pantries in the area and battling food insecurity in the local community.” There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of community gardens across Iowa that are helping to feed people in their immediate areas. Through this new network, Herzog says they hope to get a handle on roughly how many gardens are doing this good work across Iowa, and how much produce they’re donating.

“We’ll be asking the member gardens to provide us some basic annual reporting metrics that then we can help create a statewide map,” Herzog says, “and we can show all of the communities, all of the counties that are impacted by these different gardens.” Exact locations won’t be published, she says, as they don’t want gardens being overrun. Funding will end this year for the U-S-D-A’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program-Education, referred to as SNAP-Ed, so Herzog says the new network fills a critical gap in statewide support for donation gardens. “I’m sure that we won’t catch every donation garden that exists in Iowa, but we’re really trying to cast that net wide and far and let any donation garden that exists know that we want you to be a part of this story,” Herzog says. “We want to help tell your story about the good work that you may already be doing in your community and how that fits into the puzzle.”

Informational Zoom sessions to introduce the Iowa Donation Garden Network will be held tomorrow (Tuesday) at 9 AM, noon and 6 PM. Go here to register:
https://www.extension.iastate.edu/mastergardener/iowa-donation-garden-network