Six years ago, Mike Scheff had a dream of having a real farm-to-table program at the Virginia continuing care retirement community where he is dining director.
Today, with help of a master gardener, that dream has turned into something that “has exceeded my expectations,” he said.
The farm at Covenant Woods in Mechanicsville, VA, has doubled in size in the past three years, expanding its footprint from 5,000 square feet to 10,000 square feet. It’s a working farm that supplies resident activities, offers educational programming and provides service hours for local students.
More importantly, Scheff said, the farm at Covenant Woods has created an entire social structure within the community, fostering friendships and relationships.
“This program is so much more than just a farm,” Scheff said. “It brought people together. It’s given people purpose. It’s pretty fantastic.”
The key to its success, he said, was the hiring of Jennifer Alexander, a Hanover master gardener, a volunteer educator of environmentally sound horticultural practices.
Alexander works with the community’s executive chef to determine what is planted each season, and she recently expanded outside of the community to plant watermelons and pumpkins. Along with buttercrunch lettuce, onions and swiss chard, the farm produced slicer tomatoes, large cherry tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, red and gold beets and chijimi sai, an Asian green that is a spinach substitute.
As the farm grew, so did the harvest. In the past three years, the farm has added 1,000 pounds of produce harvested each year, yielding 4,000 pounds of produce this year. In July alone, the farm produced 1,200 pounds of tomatoes that went into a variety of tomato dishes, including gazpacho, tomato pies and blood mary mix.
The farm supplies 30% of the produce used by one of the community’s restaurants during high season, as well as a community farmer’s market.
“We’re a full working garden,” Alexander said. “We’ve gone from buying plants from other farms and retail locations to starting our own from seed.”
What the community couldn’t use was donated to Mechanicsville Churches Emergency Functions, or MCEF, a group of more than 30 local churches and businesses that serves as a local food pantry.
Getting residents involved
Alexander even solicited help from some of the CCRC’s 380 residents — many of whom were farmers in their previous lives — to help plant seeds, harvest and run the farm. Residents will seed 20 to 30 trays per season, she said.
Other residents contribute their food scraps to a compost pile for the garden. And two residents who work on floral arrangements throughout the community also put in requests for different flower varieties to Alexander, who was happy to oblige.
When someone new moves on campus, Alexander said, she activates the “beehive” of her nine core volunteers to decide who will go on a recruitment mission to add to the ranks.
Always looking for new ideas, spaces and program outreach, the farm-to-table group created a pond at the front of the property and planted all Virginia native plants. One resident, a former landscape designer, wrote and received a grant from the soil and water conservation district to fund the project. This past summer, the farm-to-table group planted 50 butterfly weed for Monarch butterflies. Next year, Alexander plans to increase the number of plants and add goldenrod and asters.
Next up is converting a shed used as a screening location during the COVID-19 pandemic into a working greenhouse. The greenhouse, Alexander said, will allow the farm-to-table group to grow mums, pansies, landscaping plants and native trees for the grounds.
“All kinds of things are possible,” she said, adding that she considers her situation “a dream come true.”
Alexander said she moved to Virginia 16 years ago from Indiana and lives right around the corner from Covenant Woods. “The growing season here is amazing. You could barely ask for anything better,” she said.
