Another Year, Another Garden, Another Chance at Education

Another year has come and gone and Foods of the Fundy Valley (FFV) has been continuing their work on food security through education and Farmers’ Markets. We have been a hard working organization this past year as community and school gardens, along with garden clubs, have continued on at our 3 participating schools.

Our Kids in the Kitchen programs, Shepody Café at our local food bank and Farmers’ Markets are other initiatives that keep us busy.

Our Garden Clubs provide us with some of our more entertaining interactions with the kids who are planting flowers and vegetables, while learning how to garden. The young students say that garden club is “fun”, “cool” and that playing in the dirt is the best part of garden club. Some are even helping and encouraging their parents to grow small gardens at home. The culmination of one of the elementary school garden clubs growing season is their harvest lunch they do each fall, when they use all their veggies to make soup and serve their entire school and guests with their offerings. They are always very proud of their achievement on this day.

Our Farmers’ Markets are open seasonally, May-October. Saturday’s from 9-1 our Museum Market is on in Hopewell Cape at the Albert County Museum. Sunday’s from 9-2, the Alma Market runs at Vista Ridge in Alma. Both Markets have many local food and wares along with a great breakfast each morning. Check out our Cob Oven pizza, the oven built by FFV last summer, at our Saturday markets.

Our first workshop of the season, a bee keeping workshop, met with great success, filling to capacity and making us realize the interest in bee keeping. More workshops are in the works for the coming year.

We held our first Oktoberfest event last October and it was a fun filled evening of food, music and dancing. Our hope is to turn this into a key fund raising event that will help us achieve the financial sustainability needed to run our programming. Mark your calendars for October 17^th this year at the Hillsborough Kiwanis Center as Oktoberfest #2 is already being planned.

It is still the beginning of the summer, but FFV is looking forward to another exciting and productive year. Our involvement with the Our Food NB project is a fantastic opportunity to work on the sustainability of our current programs.  As well, it has already given us some great networking opportunities to explore our big dream of a “Living Apple Museum” in our region. Stay tuned!!