Gleaning

This morning, I and few other students went to the Giamerese Farm to do gleaning. Gleaning is picking the leftover vegetables or fruits from the farms after the harvest season. We are collecting food for the Food Bank in New Jersey, which will distribute the harvest to the soup kitchen and the poor in the state. The project is called Farmers Against Hunger. It was started up by a few farmers that send some vegetables to church routinely. Now, after 10 years, it had become a huge project with collaboration with over 55 farms and volunteers from over the state. They even own a big truck for transporting the produce. In fact, some of the farmers even plant some vegetables for this purpose instead of for profits! Ok, it's the short intro for the whole idea.

We left our school around 9.45am and reached the Giamerese Farm at 10am. The farm is quite near. If I'm not mistaken, it's located at East Brunswick. After a short intro by the personnel from the Farmers Against Hungers, we started picking the vegetables. It was my first time working in the farm though I've always wanted to try it! Today, we collected colloid green and turnip green. The leaves of the colloid were so huge! They are bigger than my head. But, according to the other students, the leaves shrink a lot after being cooked. So, we better hurried up and picked more. After picking a bag full of colloid green, I tried turnip. It's quite easy to pull the turnip out from the soil because they only have one main root (or tuber?). I have a lot of fun doing that while chatting with Pat from Alpha Zeta. Too bad, there are only 2 of us from AZ. I was expecting at least 10 brothers to come because I saw their names in the mailing list. Anyway, there are many food Science graduate students and some local senior citizens who joined us :)

We ended the activity at 11.45am. At the end of day, I managed to pick a bag (big black garbage bag) of turnip green and another bag of colloid green. In total, we collected

2500 pounds

(~1oookg++) of fresh produce! That's a lot!!!! Big applause for all of us :D

In short, it's a fun and meaningful activity to do. So, if you are free on Monday 10am-12pm, feel free to join us for the good cause!