Harvest News

Brighton Shares The Harvest is giving away tomato and pepper plants at our Summerfest booth!
Stop by to say hello, receive free plants, and peruse our seed library. We'll be out there, rain or shine. 

I’d like to start with a heart-filled thank you for believing in Brighton Shares The Harvest. When Linda and I spoke about the importance of citizen run organizations like this one and the level of impact it holds, it was your words of support that told us something had to be done to hold that flame aloft. So here we are! In the 2023 growing season with a reverence for what came before us, determination for what is in front of us, and hope for what will come after us. During this year, we’ll be working to put together a few classes, on food preservation, seed saving and ways to get a head start on next year’s harvest. I’ve been told from no small amount of all of you that receiving free seeds was a highlight for each season, so we will continue looking for ways to bring you more seeds!

Article Originally published in The Brighton Connection https://brightonco.gov/279/City-Media

We are coming up on five years since the approval of the District Plan, a plan adopted in 2016 by both the City and Adams County focused on the south Brighton agricultural area, Historic Splendid Valley. This award-winning plan was put together in response to ongoing public support for preserving valuable farmland and heritage, building on policies laid out in previous land use and open space plans spanning more than 20 years.

The many action items in the District Plan fall under one of three overarching goals:

• Preserve agricultural land
• Encourage local food production & consumption
• Promote agritourism

Historic Splendid Valley is home to acres of land designated by the United States Department of Agriculture as prime farmland. This is land that has been farmed for decades and continues to produce vegetables, fruits, nursery crops, and other products for local consumption and distribution regionally and nationally. While farmland is being lost at alarming rates across the country, the City and Adams County have recognized the benefits of preserving these lands locally. These benefits include access to fresh, locally-grown fruits and vegetables, realizing our vision of a standalone city surrounded by open space and farmland, and tourism related to visiting some of our local farms.

Since the adoption of the District Plan approximately 264 acres of land have been preserved with their associated water rights. That brings the total farmland preserved in Historic Splendid Valley to about 445 acres. This is made up of both acquired lands that the City leases to local farmers, and privately-owned properties protected through conservation easements ( see our toolkit about conservation easements ). Competitive grants and key partnerships have made these successes possible, helping to ensure that our heritage and community values are reflected into the future.

To learn more about Historic Splendid Valley and the implementation of the District Plan, you can visit brightonco.gov/SplendidValley.

One of the silver linings from 2020 is that a lot of families started gardening, growing food and flowers, and a lot of them did it by planting seeds. Planting from seed has several advantages over buying potted plants that are garden-ready, including lower price, wider variety, and the ability to swap seeds with gardening friends.

There are many vegetables that you can grow by planting seeds directly in the garden, or into outside containers, at the right time of year. These dates are not hard and fast, they depend on the weather, but as a guideline:

Up through early May you can plant arugula, beets, carrots, Swiss Chard, lettuce, spinach, kale, cabbage, pak choy, mustard greens, and radishes. Seed packets will give you more information about when to plant, how deep, how far to space the seeds, etc.. Quick growing greens such as lettuce, spinach, and kale, can be cut when small for fresh salads and they’ll regrow to be cut again.

In late May or early June, you can plant beans, cantaloupe, summer and winter squash, pumpkins, cucumbers, and most herbs, including basil and cilantro. These plants need warm soil to thrive, so resist the temptation to plant too early.

Brighton Shares The Harvest is a Nonprofit that works with local gardeners to grow food for their families and for sharing. We have established a partnership with a local seed company, Botanical Interests: they will give us a rebate on all online seed orders that go through our website. To shop, simply go to www.BrightonSharesTheHarvest.org and click on the Botanical Interests Shop Now banner (scroll down; it’s on the left side). This takes you to their website where you can browse and shop for organic, heirloom, and hybrid vegetable and flower seeds.

If you have questions about this rebate program with Botanical Interests, please contact Linda Young, Executive Director of Brighton Shares The Harvest, at Linda@BrightonSharesTheHarvest.org or on 720-301-0949. Grow something!

Does meal time become a battle when it's time for your kids to eat fruits and vegetables? For many households, it does! Luckily, there are many ways to diffuse the tension at meal time while still getting your kids the fruits and vegetables that they need. Most mealtime battles happen because kids want control over their meal options. By implementing a few changes, you can give kids the "control" they crave and makes meal time more enjoyable.

1. Give your kids a choice between two options. For example, ask your kids if they would like carrots or peas for dinner. If they throw a fit, gently remind them that they chose the vegetable for tonight.

2. Involve your kids in the meal planning process. Kids are more likely to eat a meal that they helped plan and create. Depending on your child's age, kids can be involved in several different ways. For younger kids, ask them to help measure out the frozen peas or shuck the corn. For older kids, ask for help finding recipes and making the shopping list.

3. Try new fruits and vegetables. The supermarkets are stocked with a large variety of fruits and vegetables. Allow your kids to pick our a new fruit or vegetable (fresh, frozen, or canned) at the store for the whole family to try. Some stores may provide you with a sample if you ask the produce clerk.

4. Serve fruits and vegetables in a variety of new ways. Your child may not like canned green beans but they may love steamed green beans. Encourage your child to try a certain fruit and vegetable prepared in new ways before deciding that food is not for them.

5. Allow your child to not eat fruits or vegetables that they don't enjoy. Everyone has foods that they do not like and its okay for your child to dislike some fruits and vegetables. When your child expresses a dislike for a food, have them describe it and what they do not like about a food. Is it too sweet, too sour, or bitter? By identifying what they do not like about the food, it will help both of you understand more about taste preferences and keep them from just saying "Yuck, this is gross!"

6. Be a good role model. Kids learn by watching behaviors of adults during mealtimes. If you implement new processes, be sure that you stick to them, too!

Hannah Murphy, RD, CNSC
Platte Valley Medical Center

As a Nonprofit that’s all about connecting people to fresh produce, we usually write and talk about ways to get more produce into your daily diets. We aren’t encouraging people to become vegetarians or vegans, just to eat more fresh produce. But we’re all going to be hearing a lot more, from a variety of sources, about why you should also consider eating less meat, and it’s not all about your health. It’s about the health of the planet as well.

5280 Magazine (5280.com) has an article in the September 2019 issue called “Meat Matters” about the practice of regenerative agriculture, a way of grazing grass-fed animals that is better for the animals and much better for the land, and meat from these animals is better for your health. If you’re one of those people, as I am, who prefers not to think about feedlots and commercial slaughterhouses, you might want to learn about how those practices impact the environment (manure pollution of waterways, as just one example), and what the true cost of cheap meat is to you, the animals, and the environment.

What’s a responsible consumer to do, especially working families that cannot afford to pay $26 for a chicken? Educate yourself on where your food comes from, and how the meat you’re buying was raised. Consider trying some of the new plant-based meat substitutes (we’ll all be hearing more about those, too). This is not without controversy; you can read about a new “Better with Beef” campaign:
www.journal-advocate.com/2019/09/04/colorado-beef-industry-launches-education-campaign/. Beef is a major industry in Colorado, and it’s definitely possible to find beef that has been raised responsibly. Colorado has a beef council: www.cobeef.com.

While you chew on all of this info, we encourage you to continue to include fresh fruits and vegetables in your meals and snacks. Dried beans, while technically not “fresh” produce, are minimally processed, and are an excellent source of very affordable protein; they can be cooked and used as a main ingredient or a minor player in salads, soups, stews, casseroles, burritos, and many more dishes. Dry beans are easy to cook and you can find numerous recipes online.

Our website, www.BrightonSharesTheHarvest.org , has additional information about how you can access, or share, fresh healthy produce, including additional nutrition resources under the Get Produce tab. For additional questions about our services, please contact our Director, Linda Young, at 720-301-0949 or Linda@BrightonSharesTheHarvest.org.

 

“Self Care” is a term we hear a lot these days. The concept is very basic: no matter what you do, what many roles you may perform in your life, you must take care of yourself or you won’t be able to do anything well. We know that we need nutrients for our bodies to perform, to even keep us alive. Nutrition can be complex and confusing, with new information coming at us all the time. While it may be fascinating to some, it is overwhelming to many of us, so we just ignore it.

 

While we recognize the signals from our stomach when it’s empty, and we feel hungry, it’s not as easy to recognize the signals from our body that we aren’t getting enough of the nutrients we need to stay healthy and strong. Just as our stomach needs to be refilled throughout the day, our bodies need to be refueled regularly. The recommended 5 – 9 daily servings of vegetables and fruits will help you get those nutrients, but it’s not always easy to accomplish.

 

You don’t have to make it complicated, you don’t even need recipes. There are lots of fresh fruits and vegetables that don’t require much preparation, just washing, maybe slicing, that can easily be added to meals and be served as snacks. Even canned or frozen vegetables added to a meal will provide some much needed nutrition, with very little cost or effort. One of the easiest ways to make sure you’re getting a lot of nutrients is to eat a variety of fresh produce, different colors, and more vegetables than fruit. Fresher is better, so look for produce that is in season and grown locally, as nutrients diminish over time, but any healthy produce added to your diet will benefit your body.

 

Our website, www.BrightonSharesTheHarvest.org , has additional information about how you can access, or share, fresh healthy produce, including additional nutrition resources under the Get Produce tab. For additional questions about our services, please contact our Director, Linda Young, at 720-301-0949 or Linda@BrightonSharesTheHarvest.org.

~ For several years, we've been part of, and have benefited from, King Soopers Neighborhood Rewards, now Community Rewards program. If you connect your Rewards Card or Alternate ID to our organization, King Soopers will give us a percentage of what you spend. Your privacy is totally protected; they will not tell us who is connected, and this will take less than two minutes of your time.

 

Just sign in to www.KingSoopers.com , click on Community Rewards on the left, and select Brighton Shares The Harvest. You only have to do that once and we will benefit every time you shop. This is an excellent way to support us, at absolutely no cost to you , and if you let me know you did it, you'll get our quarterly email Thank You and a short report on how we're spending this money to help families in Brighton access fresh, healthy produce.

 

GOT ZUCCHINI???

~ It's that time of year; you hear somebody laugh about how people are randomly hiding zucchini around their office or that they have a car full if anybody wants one. Brighton Shares The Harvest was started as a way to connect gardeners with extra produce to people who might not have access to fresh produce, initially by asking gardeners to donate the produce to food pantries. Over the years, we've found many ways to support our mission of putting more fresh produce on more tables in Brighton, but our local food pantries could still really use help from our local gardeners.

 

If you, or a friend or neighbor, have more produce than your family can use, please do consider donating some of it to organizations that can help Brighton families access this fresh, nutritious food. One of the challenges with fresh produce is donating it while it's fresh, so we've listed information on our website by day of the week, making it easy for you to determine where you can donate fresh produce when it's convenient for you.  Click on Give Produce , for days, times, and locations.

~ Thanks to the many folks who came out to the Chamber's Business After Hours event at Berry Patch Farms on August 22. If you were there but didn't get a $10 Berry Patch Gift Card from me, or if your kid didn't get a scarf, let me know and we'll see if we can take care of that. I think everybody enjoyed the event, and the Chamber will be doing more activities involving our local farms, so stay tuned for the next opportunity.

 

~ In the meantime, please check out the Chamber's new website https://discoverbrightonfarms.com/for locations of our local farm stands/farm markets as well as upcoming farm festivals and events. The bounty and variety of fresh produce available at our local farms just keeps getting better and better. Don't miss out!

Looking for festivals and events happening at our local Brighton Farms? Whether you're a local, new in town, or just passing through, you'll be sure to find something fun going on at one of our farms.

Brighton Shares The Harvest has an opportunity to receive much needed funding from King Soopers at no cost to you, but we need your help! Please help us receive rebates from the King Soopers Neighborhood Rewards program by connecting your Rewards Card to our organization. Your privacy is completely protected. We receive a rebate for a percentage of what you spend, but we won’t know who has signed up.  If you can help us by participating, please let me know you did so we can say Thank You, and can let our supporters know how much income you are collectively generating for us. We really need this funding to support our projects that connect people to more fresh, healthy produce in Brighton. Thanks in advance for helping us out. Please contact Linda Young at Linda@BrightonSharesTheHarvest.org or 720-301-0949.

 

Sign in at https://www.kingsoopers.com/CommunityRewards

1. Select "My Account" from the drop down menu.
2. Select "Community Rewards" from the menu on the left side of the screen, under My Account.
3. Under "Find An Organization", type in Brighton Shares The Harvest Inc, then click Search.
4. When it brings up our organization name and address, click on the blue ENROLL button. You're done!