LSA Green Team: Peace & Carrots Community Garden

Since Spring 2018, the staff of LSA’s Riverside Office have collected coffee grounds and other organic food waste from their personal kitchens and the office for donation to the compost pile at the La Verne Church of the Brethren Peace and Carrots Community Garden.

The Peace and Carrots Community Garden has operated on the La Verne Church of the Brethren property since 2010, thanks to many generous volunteers tending the Garden every week. Since its inception, the Garden has donated over 20,000 pounds of organic fruits and vegetables to the local food bank Beta Center, which is affiliated with the Inland Valley Hope Partners in the city of Pomona. As of July, the Garden had donated over 2,300 pounds of fresh food this year, which is estimated to feed almost 600 people! For the week of July 20–26, the Garden donated:

• 19 pounds of cucumber
• 51 pounds of squash
• 66 pounds of tomatoes
• 2 pounds of peppers
• 6 pounds of eggplant

Peace and Carrots Community Garden:

• Mission Statement: The Community Garden will encourage community involvement, promote stewardship of the earth, and provide food and education for ourselves and our neighbors in need.
• Values: The Community Garden will value partnership and sharing, organic gardening, stewardship of creation, and assistance to those in need. Also, the Garden will value the ability to be self-sustaining and will be inclusive of all the community.
• Programs: The programs of the Garden will involve year-round gardening, educational opportunities, and outreach through participation and food distribution.

An integral component of the Garden’s educational programs is to teach Garden volunteers methods of composting, which can be applied on a smaller scale at home. Composting elements consisting of organic materials (sources of bacteria and fungi for promoting decomposition) and water (required to maintain levels of bacteria and fungi) are combined to produce a source of nutrients for fruits and vegetables. Organic materials include green material (e.g., grasses, fresh leaves and weeds, and vegetable and fruit kitchen scraps, all of which are sources of nitrogen) and brown material (e.g., dead leaves, chopped stalks, wood chips, husks, nut shells, hay, and grains such as cereals and breads from the kitchen, all of which are sources of carbon). Currently, the Garden is using a layering approach to composting, alternating green, brown, and soil layers while adding water to maintain moisture levels. To this end, the Peace and Carrots Community Garden sincerely appreciates LSA’s contribution to the Garden’s compost pile to help the Garden maintain its mission to the community and the Earth.

LSA Green Team seeks to educate and promote green practices in business and individually to improve the quality of life for LSA’s clients, employees, communities, and the planet. Have an idea or resource we should know about? We’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment or email us.