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Backyard Friendship Gardens

A community of backyard gardeners growing food
for Friendship Trays,
Charlotte’s “meals on wheels” program

Carrots!

  • Do you garden in your backyard?
  • Would you enjoy sharing what comes from your garden and belonging to a network of other local gardeners?
  • Are you willing to plant a little more to help feed hungry neighbors in your community?


Join a network of backyard gardeners who donate produce from their backyard gardens to Friendship Trays, our local meals on wheels program.

The Need:

Friendship Trays delivers more than 700 meals every week day to elderly, handicapped, and/or convalescing people who are unable to prepare or secure meals on their own. Friendship Trays and their hundreds of volunteers do not simply fill their recipients bellies, they are dedicated to providing nutritious, balanced meals to each recipient, many of whom have specific health challenges.

To help meet the increasing need for fresh, healthy food, Friendship Trays and Slow food Charlotte teamed up to create Friendship Gardens, a growing network of gardens located at schools, churches, and other nonprofit agencies. Each Friendship Garden donates a portion of their harvest back to Friendship Trays. Even with our Friendship Garden network, we fall short of growing all of Friendship Trays' year round food needs. 700 meals every week day is a lot of food!

We are reaching out to backyard gardeners for help. As a backyard friendship gardener, you can help feed hungry people in your community by donating a portion of your harvest to Friendship Trays.

How it Works:

Sign up through our website. Read our “most wanted” veggie list. We are happy to give you any seeds that you need (visit our free seed rack at Friendship Trays). You can donate your surplus veggies or designate a section of your garden for Friendship Trays. When it comes time to harvest be sure to read and follow our “Safe food handling guidelines” to ensure that all donated harvest is suitable to eat. Finally, please deliver your harvest donation to Friendship Trays, delivery instructions here. We will track your donations by weight so that we can thank you and celebrate our successes together.

Amount:

No harvest donation is too small! Even if it is just two zucchini, we want it and will make sure it is used to feed people that need it. If 50 people donate two zucchini each, suddenly we have enough fresh nutritious zucchini for a meal.

Impact:

With our vegetable growing powers combined we can ensure that Friendship Trays recipients are served the very best food that there is: fresh, healthy, delicious, food grown with love in our own backyards.

Sign up now as a Backyard Friendship Gardener and please share this page with a gardening friend.

For questions about this program please contact the volunteer project leader Bill Robinson at robins.wh [at] gmail.com or Friendship Gardens program director Henry Owen at henry [at] friendship-gardens.org. For media inquires please visit our Media Inquiries page.

Delivering Friendship Trays