End Hunger through Gardening!
The Dinner Garden is working to end hunger in the United States through home and community gardening. We are striving to create one garden for every six Americans.
You can grow your own food!
Are you new to gardening? Are you concerned you won't be able to garden or can't afford it? Remember, people were growing their own food long before gardening stores were invented! Human civilization began because people started gardening instead of foraging for food. They had seeds, dirt, and water. So if you have dirt and water, we'll provide the seeds!
Those gardening catalogs and stores are lovely, and there are definitely products that make gardening easier and plants grow faster. BUT, you don't need those products to grow enough food for your family.
We have gardeners who plant in their front and back yards. We also have gardeners who have no yards and who grow veggies in every available window in their house or in pots on their patios.
Don't be tricked into thinking you are not a gardener. We are all gardeners. Anyone can grow their own food. The seeds do all the work!
We have advice and tips on our website to help you be successful. Read our Dinner Garden Planting Guide for information on summer and winter crops, seed planting depths, plant spacing, and germination temperatures. We have a new page devoted to seed saving. Our partner, World Food Garden has a wealth of information on gardening, such as what plants grow in your area and when you should plant your seeds. They have free gardening mentors to offer advice. You can always email as at info@dinnergarden.org with any questions you have!
Our Mission to End Hunger
The Dinner Garden provides seeds, gardening supplies, and gardening advice free of charge to all people in the United States of America. We assist those in need in establishing food security for their families. Our goal is for people to plant home, neighborhood, and container gardens so they can use the vegetables they grow for food and income.
Since beginning our mission in early 2009, we have provided seeds to over 48,000 families and over 120 community gardens! We have reached into all 50 states, from Maine to Hawaii and Texas to Alaska! Our volunteers and partners are hard at work, packaging and delivering seeds in many of these states. We have received donations from all over the country from individuals. We have also received seeds, gardening supplies, and cash donations from numerous companies. Check them out on our Friends of the Dinner Garden Page. Needless to say, we are overjoyed by the requests for seeds, the donations, and the volunteer outpouring we have seen in these few short months. We are also very pleased to have been featured in several news articles. The Dinner Garden has even made it to television! Check it out here!
We are always in need of donations to support our cause! We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation, so your donations are tax deductible. Click the link below to donate to The Dinner Garden!
Buy a Book to Support The Dinner Garden
The author, JJ McMoon, is donating a percentage of the gross sales of his book, "Lives", to The Dinner Garden. Each book he sells through his website will generatate a donation for The Dinner Garden. You can buy the book here. This is a great chance for The Dinner Garden to have a lot of money donated to us!
As a special Dinner Garden Promotion, Lives will be shipped immediately to anyone who orders from this link: Order Lives Now.
You can read about the book here: www.livesbyjjmcmoon.com.
History of Home Gardens
The concept of home and community gardening is not new. However, this kind of gardening has fallen out of practice. The inspiration for this project grew out of two things. First, the economy is in bad shape. We know many people who have lost their jobs and are struggling to make it. They are cutting costs wherever they can. When they've stripped their budgets as far as they can go, they are left with deciding between food and rent or food and medicine.
History was our second inspiration. In World War I and World War II, families in the United States and Britain planted Victory Gardens due to shortages in food and labor. Food at the market was rationed, so families went without many essentials. In both wars, the United States provided food for soldiers and civilians in Europe where farmers had joined the war and their land had been turned into battlegrounds.
To provide that food, backyards, school playgrounds, churches, empty lots, and even roof tops became gardens. In 1918, the United States had 5,285,000 gardens. The 1919
harvest produced 528,500,000 pounds of food. During WWII, Americans planted 20,000,000 gardens, or one garden for every seven Americans. Those gardens grew 20 billion pounds of produce.
Start at the Beginning
Victory gardeners used any available space. Today, we have plenty of space. Americans have lawns filled with grass, vacant lots, schools and churches with wide open yards, median strips, and public parks.
Patios and decks easily become gardens. Take a container, add some dirt, plant a seed, and place it on the front porch. Fill the front porch with potted plants, and you have the equivalent of a garden plot.
All of this food starts with a seed. A head of lettuce from one seed costs between $2.00 to $3.00. A pound of squash will cost you $2.00 to $3.00. One squash seed will produce several pounds of squash. Tomatoes run $1.00 to $2.00 per pound. One seed will produce around 40 pounds of tomatoes. Carrots cost about $1.00 per pound, or about $.20 a carrot.
250 Beefsteak tomato seeds cost us $9.00. We pay $18.00 for 216,000 carrot seeds. Lettuce is $16.00 for 372,000 seeds. 7,350 squash seeds cost $18.00. That equates to paying $9.00 for 10,000 pounds of tomatoes, $18.00 for 216,000 carrots, $16.00 for 372,000 heads of lettuce, and $18.00 for 110,250 pounds of squash. For this example, the retail price for all this produce is $1,263,825. So for $61 in seeds, we can grow about $1.3 million worth of vegetables.
For the general public, growing a garden is an expense. To many, that expense to simply too great. A pack of seeds from the store can cost $1.00 to $3.00. Containers, dirt, fertilizer, and mulch add $20 to $100 more. That is why we started The Dinner Garden. We provide those seeds for free. We show you ways to garden with the materials you have around the house, like milk jugs for containers, kitchen scraps for fertilizer, and free mulch from the dump. As we grow, we will provide free supplies. We are also your source for gardening information. Check out our numerous resources on plants, seeds, pests, and cooking and preserving your produce. Be sure to check out our partner, www.worldfoodgarden.org for gardening advice, tips, and free gardening mentors!
You don't have to travel back very far in history to find a time when all of this was a regular way of life. Perhaps your mother and father canned vegetables. Maybe you had a garden of potatoes behind your house when you were a child. We hope to see home vegetable and fruit production to become a part of life again.
If you need seeds or have a gardening question, contact us. Do you want to donate to our cause? We accept anything, including your time (we always need people packing and shipping seeds). We are a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation, so your donations will be tax deductible!
The Big Idea
The idea for The Dinner Garden is a simple one. If people can grow their own food, they won't have to depend on public assistance for food support. Families who have food security are more productive, less stressed, and have more disposable income. We decided to start at the beginning: with the seeds. That was actually the easy part, since seeds are very cheap when you buy them in bulk. The challenge has been finding a way to distribute seeds to people all over the country. The cost of shipping the seeds to someone far exceeds the cost of the seeds themselves. To help save on the shipping costs, we have partnered with organizations all over the country to act as a distribution point for seeds in that area. We ship seeds to those organizations, then people in the area pick up seeds from them.
In an effort to broaden our impact and because we are committed to ending hunger and working with others to achieve this goal, we are sharing information we have with other groups who would like to provide similar services. Other organizations have approached us wanting to start their own seed distribution program based on The Dinner Garden Model. So, here is the short version of how we run The Dinner Garden. Feel free to use this information to provide seeds to people in your community. If you come up with an idea that is cheaper, easier, or just cooler, please let us know!
The Seeds
The Dinner Garden relies heavily on donations to stock our seed supply. When we do purchase seeds we buy them from www.mainstreetseedandsupply.com. Buying seeds in bulk is much less expensive than buying prepackaged seeds. No matter where we get our seeds, we repackage them for donation. The packs you can buy at the store contain more seeds than the average gardener will use in a year. When we buy bulk seeds, they come in packages containing thousands or hundreds of thousands of seeds. Depending on the type of seed, we package three to ten seeds of each plant for our clients. We package four to five plant varieties in each garden donation pack we create.
The Bags
We purchase our seed bags at www.papermart.com. We buy bags in two sizes:
Item # 1510223 2 X 3 2 Mil Clear Recloseable Poly Bag a case of 1000 costs $5.10
Item # 1510244 4 X 4 2 Mil Clear Recloseable Poly Bag a case of 1000 costs $9.00
We use far more of the small bags. We put the seeds in the small bags and write the name of the seeds on the bag with a permanent marker. Then we put the seed bags and a business card or computer printed information sheet into the bigger bag. The end product is very easy to manage.
The Business Cards
We buy our business cards at www.vistaprint.com They are inexpensive, fast, and do quality work. The cards have our logo, contact information, and our phrasing, "These seeds are a gift. Use them to grow food for your family and community." Some of our business cards are printed in both English and Spanish.