NASHUA, NH – On May 22, a team from Fidelity Investments is set to prep the garden beds and plant produce for Nashua Soup Kitchen and Shelter’s (NSKS) 10th season of organic gardening. A team of 8 to 10 volunteers is needed to tend the garden throughout the growing season.
Upon expanding to their current building on Quincy Street in 2014, staff at the shelter knew they wanted to transform the grass and gravel space outside of the building into a garden.
“It was Lisa Christie, the executive director, who said ‘we’re going to do something with this,’ and she worked with one of our board members to get this plan off the ground,” said Carol Weeks, director of community relations.
The vision was made a reality in May of 2015, when a team of Fidelity employees built the four raised 12-by-8-foot garden beds along Quincy Street, and four raised 8-by-4-foot beds on East Pearl Street. In 2018, the gardens expanded to Spring Street in partnership with Grow Nashua.
Since then, NSKS has grown thousands of pounds of produce to serve in the kitchen and supply to families in the food pantry, from lettuce, butternut squash, peas, and broccoli, to rosemary, thyme, basil, and cilantro.
“We try to have the kitchen serve something nutritious and as fresh as can be for a meal, and then if there’s too much, then we have it out at the food pantry,” Weeks said.
Besides the garden, NSKS gets food from the New Hampshire Food Bank, local farmers, and independent gardeners. While the produce from their garden certainly helps the supply, Weeks says there is never enough.
About 800 families go through the food pantry a month, and upwards of 180 people come to the kitchen a night for dinner.
“We have noticed over the past six weeks to two months that we’ve been getting less produce,” Weeks said. “We can only imagine the future with the storms that were down south, a lot of the crops got ruined, and if the tariffs are impacting the price of things from Canada and Mexico, then we’re going to see an increase of people coming here who can’t afford to go grocery shopping.”
NSKS cook Giovanna Cruz says the garden helps the shelter overcome these challenges, and allows her to be more creative in the kitchen and make a variety of meals, from fresh salads to stirfries.
“It helps because sometimes if we don’t get enough vegetables to cook, we use the garden,” she said, “I remember one day no vegetables came in and we went out there and we got a lot of lettuce to make a salad.”
For Weeks, the productivity of the garden has been a surprise.
“I thought after a couple of years it would probably fade away, but it [hasn’t],” she said. “It’s unbelievable, it’s just hundreds and hundreds of pounds, it adds up over the season.”
“Hopefully it will be a good growing season this year,” she added.
Those interested in volunteering at the shelter can email Weeks at [email protected]