“If You Can’t Grow Food in Your Community, You Are Not Prepared”

John Fossett, the adult services librarian at the Bainbridge Public Library, once attended a virtual preparedness summit at which a woman said, “If you can’t grow food in your community, you are not prepared.” As one-half of the dynamic duo that runs Veg Club, a monthly online (with some live field trips) educational series that teaches people how to grow food, Fossett has devoted a good portion of his time to ensuring that on Bainbridge Island we never have to find out if what the woman said is true.

The duo’s other half is Carol Appenzeller, a former middle school and high school science teacher. Carol and John met through the quarterly Map Your Neighborhood captains’ meetings at the library. They came up with the idea for Veg Club one day when they happened to be talking about growing food. John mentioned that he had always wanted to start a food-growing class and, as part of the Bainbridge Prepares Food Resilience Team at the time, he thought the topic was relevant to community preparedness. Carol said, “Pick me.” She had already written curriculum for such a class and was eager to put it to good use.

Reflecting on Two Years of Veg Club

Now at the conclusion of the second year of the very popular Veg Club, Carol and John sat down together to reflect on its success and what it means for the community. The monthly club is regularly attended online by about 35 people, some of whom are “die-hard attendees.” Classes have covered a range of topics including Make your own compost; Garden pests and diseases; How to grow tree fruit; Fermentation; Storing your harvest in garden, garage, and pantry; Differentiating insect pests from helpful predators; Extend your vegetable garden season and yield; Use your powerful soil ecosystem; Planting to eat from your garden all winter; Pickle and jam your harvest; and Grow fruit in a small or large yard.

Fossett noticed how people participating in the community read program BI Reads tend to digest information. The program would get good attendance at the senior center discussion gatherings, but the videos of the meetings did even better, each exceeding 100 views. Based on that information, he decided to create a collection of Veg Club classes on video that he now shares on what Carol calls “John’s excellent YouTube channel” so that people can watch the classes at any time.

There is no end in sight for Veg Club. Carol said, “Gardening is cumulative in terms of understanding. It’s not just put it in the ground and be patient and there you go. The more you know, the more you learn in a relaxed way, the more you have in your arsenal.”

John explains the club’s success this way: “I like how Carol presents the topics. It’s logical and extremely accessible. The science is there but presented in a way you can understand. She has a calm delivery that builds confidence in you, offering lots of examples.”

Storing Your Harvest

One of the most important gardening topics is food storage. Storage is so crucial that half of one Veg Club class and another full class are devoted to it. Carol said, “Communities that learn to grow food also learn to store it.” She added, “There are communities where every household has a lot of root crops. Those communities are more stable in emergencies.”

She knows what she’s talking about. She and her husband have such a successful family garden at their home in Winslow that, during Covid, they only had to go to the grocery store about once a month to get things they couldn’t grow “like flour and tofu.” Because they didn’t store much of their produce in the fridge but instead canned, dehydrated, froze, and fermented it, they could store more fruits and veggies for later use.

“I don’t have an expectation that we’re going to eat the lettuce in our gardens and that will suffice,” Carol said. “In a less acute emergency like Covid, it was materially nice, because we were self supplying, it created a network of other growers which I was connected to, and it was a healthy physical activity during a time when there were fewer of those.” But for more acute emergencies, people need to know how to store fruits and an assortment of vegetables for months.

Learning to Garden

Although John and Carol both grew up with farming parents, they learned to garden as adults. John’s parents “worked all summer long and then would cover the garden spot in the back of the yard with manure and seaweed,” generating compost that would then help yield “wonderful stuff. Giant crocks of pickles. Shelves of canned tomatoes and carrots.” But he credits his wife and Veg Club with his transformation into a gardener: “I doubled down when the classes came around. I now spend almost every summer day in the garden with the dogs.”

Carol’s parents grew up on ranch farms, and her mother was raised on a fully self-contained ranch. But Carol’s experience was different. Although she grew up in the country, her parents were no longer ranchers and had “suburban jobs.” As an adult, she was able to make the connection to gardening through her science education: “I love the mental challenge of applying the science of it and understanding how many millions of bacteria and how many species are in a teaspoon of soil.”

A Serious Turn

The conversation started to get more serious when Carol spoke about ranchers, like her parents’ families. She said, “When they did the family model, they were not alienated from their production.” She described the “kind of attention” her parents “had for the natural world and the intelligence, science, skill, and mental acuity you need to be able to do that kind of stuff, especially if your entire livelihood depends on it.”

She added, “We’re invited in but our society moves us away from that. We’re encouraged not to engage in the cycle of the ecosystem. That cycle is Growth, Ripening, Maturity, and Rot. But we have CC&Rs that say we have to do things to interrupt this cycle. I think the piles of pumpkins rotting on our porches might be our attempt to get that back.”

John said he is grateful that he has “been allowed to have a life that was up against the perennial reality of the world.” He adds, “One of the things I like about having a personal garden is that it’s one way to combat the consolidation of resources and maximization of profit. It’s kind of my own little rebellious streak.”

Carol teared up when speaking about a poem that was read at her uncle’s funeral, a poem he had selected for the reading. She can’t remember it exactly but said that it referred to “aligning one's beliefs with the underlying realities of the world, acknowledging the responsibility we have toward the environment and future generations.”

Librarian John immediately dove into his computer to try to identify the poem for Carol. He was unable to find it but came up with something equally good, a Wendell Berry quote that, although about marriage, seems particularly fitting for the contexts of food gardening and emergency preparedness:

“[T]here is relief and freedom in knowing what is real; these givens come to us out of the perennial reality of the world, like the terrain we live on. One does not care for this ground to make it a different place, or to make it perfect, but to make it inhabitable and to make it better. To flee from its realities is only to arrive at them unprepared.”

Veg Club starts up again in the new year. To join the Veg Club reminders and news list, email Carol@hawkapp.com.

Watch previous classes on video here.