My Garden Is Your Garden

In the old days, it was a cup of sugar you’d borrow from your neighbor. Now it’s homegrown citrus, celery and sweet potatoes—freshly picked and bursting with natural flavor. Join the Coronado Home Harvest (CHH) Saturday, Feb. 19, at the and get your free bag of the finest produce this town has to offer.

The CHH meets monthly and is a produce exchange that began last year as an idea between three friends and longtime Coronado residents Wendy McGuire, Marla English and Sharon Sherman. Open to the public, it’s a place where you can bring your extra produce and swap it out for a variety of locally grown fruits, vegetables, herbs and flowers.

“Everybody comes, not with a specific vision, but just to gather together and trade information,” Sherman said. “People are asking each other questions. People are wanting to get their hands back in the dirt. They’re wanting to learn how to cook again.”

The rules are simple: Bring whatever you can spare from your garden or kitchen and leave with a bag full of fresh goodies. Prospective attendees are asked to e-mail the CHH by Thursday to get a sense of what things will already be there and an idea for what they can contribute. 

The drop-off time for the exchange is between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m., and a tag is given to anyone who brings a homegrown offering. It takes a couple of hours to sort and divvy up the loot, so plan on grabbing a cup o’ joe or window shopping along Orange Avenue until 11 a.m., when you can swing back by and grab a bag that’s chock full of produce.

“You get something from everybody,” said veteran gardener Barbara Murphy. “One woman went to India and she brought back nutmeg—it doesn’t grow here. And so we had a little container of fresh nutmeg.”

That woman was McGuire, who is also the owner of Ganosh Gourmet, a local food delivery service, and a self-proclaimed “enthusiastic novice gardener.”  This weekend, she’ll be giving a presentation at the exchange on “Cooking from Your Garden,” which will include recipes, food samples and several other cooking resources.

Previous presentations have included talks about edible landscaping, vermicomposting and how to achieve a tasty diet that's free from corn syrup.

“A lot of people learn things and change their eating habits,” McGuire said. “The programs kind of suggest themselves … I don’t think we’re going to run out of ideas any time soon.”

Want to come but don’t have much of a green thumb? Not to worry. Cook up a delectable dish and drop that off instead—just be sure to list the ingredients for fellow foodies with allergies. And if you’d rather leave the cooking to the professionals, ask a neighbor if they’d like to partner up, or offer to harvest the garden of someone who can’t and share the goody bag you get with them in return.

“You can bring something that you grew, or you can bring something that you made,” said Kale Stacy, a cook at Ganosh Gourmet. “Either way, it doesn’t really matter—it’s just something you contribute.”

So if you’re interested in taking that next step toward sustainability (and who isn’t nowadays?), stop on by this month’s harvest exchange and meet some like-minded people. At the very least, you'll get some ideas on how to cook all the fresh produce you just received.

“Our vision was for people to get together, and that’s worked out perfectly,” English said. “Sometimes it’s great, sometimes it’s a little light, but it’s whatever it is. People just getting together and starting a conversation about all this stuff is worth it.”