Harvesting for Hempstead's soup kitchen

Every Wednesday during the summer, Cathy Newman of Hewlett worked up a sweat harvesting corn, tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, cucumbers and summer squash under the blazing sun and then loaded her hatchback with boxes of the fresh produce.

She wasn't visiting a pick-your-own farm out east, and she wasn't driving home to cook for her family. Instead, on days when she could have been relaxing at the beach, the stay-at-home mother of twin teenage girls hauled the nutritious vegetables to the Mary Brennan INN soup kitchen in Hempstead.

Along with 20 other master gardeners from the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Nassau County, Newman volunteered to plant and maintain the vegetable gardens in Eisenhower Park in East Meadow and showed up dutifully every week to harvest and transport the goods to those in need.

The display gardens behind the park's greenhouse are somewhat of an inadvertent secret. Although those in the know work to spread the word, for some reason most people I encounter are completely unaware of their existence. And yet, situated just inside the park's Hempstead Turnpike entrance, right near Parking Field 3, the gardens paint the landscape with inspiration for gardeners all over Long Island.

A new type of garden

All season long, master-gardener volunteers work tirelessly to design, plant and maintain the Butterfly Garden, Rose Garden, Herb Garden and other beds whose sole raison d'être is to help local gardeners by providing ideas and demonstrating which plants can successfully be grown in the area. Each garden has a mailbox at its entrance, and within, visitors can find maps detailing what plants are featured there. It's a wonderful resource, and what's more, it's free.

This year, Nancy Youngfert, president of the Nassau CCE board of directors, proposed starting a vegetable garden there. A retired teacher, Youngfert has a passion for introducing vegetable gardening to local schools and wanted master gardeners to get some hands-on experience learning which vegetables grow best on Long Island so they could help schools start their own gardens.

"It's one thing for students to put a bean into a cup and watch it sprout, but it's another thing to involve them in a viable garden and give them a tomato at the end," she explained.

A call was sent out for master gardeners to form a committee. During their first meeting, someone suggested donating the garden's harvest to The INN (Interfaith Nutrition Network) soup kitchen, and an altruistic endeavor was born.

Committee co-chairman Bill Teleisha of Hempstead already was familiar with - and inspired by - the organization.

"My wife's church is active at The INN," he said. "I knew about it through her and some church members, and I was very impressed with it. The INN also was the biggest organization in the area, and it was close, so dropping off the produce would be easy."

Community response

The committee embraced the idea immediately. At that first meeting in April, members voluntarily chipped in $5 apiece to buy supplies to facilitate their project. The fund was used for seedlings, bamboo stakes for square-foot gardens, plant ties and gas.

The response from the community was a pooling of resources and talents: Oberle's Florist in East Meadow sold steeply discounted seedlings to the group, Sweet Peet of LI in Glen Cove donated its namesake mulch, and the extension's herb garden committee contributed its harvests so that meals prepared with the donated vegetables would be tastier.

In July, committee members toured The INN so that they could see firsthand exactly what - and whom - their efforts would benefit. Newman was especially touched by the experience.

"I was just so impressed with the whole operation, the way it ran and the philosophy there. Everyone is so polite, so thankful, the environment is so positive," she said.

Although she already was volunteering in the gardens, that first encounter inspired her to do even more for The INN.

"I knew right then that I would be interested in volunteering there, too, and my kids do community service so they came with me," she said.

Newman's daughter, Kate Fine, 16, said her volunteer experience has been a positive one. "I was a little scared at first because I didn't know the people," she said, "but they're all really nice." And she says she is always happy to see people wearing clothes she donated and eating cupcakes she baked. Her sister, Jenny, has joined her at The INN on occasion.

'We're very fortunate'

When approached by Teleisha last spring, Cynthia Succich, director of communications at The INN, said she lit up. "Bill called with this great idea, and just knowing that we'd be getting everything they harvest was wonderful," she said. "We're very fortunate that they chose us." The INN serves just one meal a day, from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. Recently, 590 guests arrived for a single meal, a record number in The INN's 28-year history.

"Now that the weather is starting to change, that number will grow," Succich said. "The faces of those guests have really changed over the last six months. We're seeing more middle-class people who've lost their jobs and are coming in to make ends meet.

The donations have enabled the staff to prepare a fresh salad and homemade soup every day.

"It's very important to us to be able to provide a nutritious meal made from scratch," she said. "We really appreciate all that Cornell is doing for us."

All summer long, master gardener volunteers descended upon the vegetable garden twice a week, tools in tow, to cultivate the nine 30-by-5 plots, plant seedlings, weed, harvest and make deliveries. By mid-September, more than 700 pounds of produce had been donated to The Inn, and as the summer crop was dwindling, cool-season plants like lettuce were being sown for a fall harvest"We just wanted to utilize the land to help the needy," Teleisha said. "It was a joint effort that not only helped people, but made everyone feel good about it. It's been a really uplifting project."