These are the Before Pictures

The GroW on the Vern Garden is finally taking off! These photos are purely for documentation purpose, so everyone can see how far the garden has gone. Soil is being delivered today, plants and trees are coming next week. Stay tuned to see all the major changes!



Just imagine these beds filled with flowers, shrubs, herbs, and trees -the trellis covered with muscadine grapes and the wall grid with hops.

If you are interested in helping the garden come to fruition, email foodjusticealliance@gmail.com, we need all the help we can get!

Out with Summer in with Fall

This weekend a bunch of volunteers came to the garden to help transition from Summer crop to Fall. We pulled out all of our dying cucumber plants to make way for hearty greens and radish.



We also pulled the seeds from one of our marigold blooms to sprinkle around the bed. Marigolds are a great natural pesticide too.



Also, our pumpkin and squash plants are coming in small, but strong!


The muralists who are going to be painting a mural on the white wall behind the garden came to volunteers and get to know FJA members. They helped us plant seeds in trays and transplant coneflowers. Thank you Albus Cavus muralists, can't wait to see the wonderful work you will be doing in our garden!

GW is totally becoming more food friendly and healthy! Diane Robinson Knapp, partner in crime to President Steven Knapp, is revealing her best kept secret to a few lucky undergraduates. She has a Master's in Nutrition from Cornell, and is sharing her wisdom on healthy eating in her very own kitchen on F St. With help from her chef, Robert, who learned his ways at the Culinary Institute of America, Diane is covering everything students need to know about eating on campus with a healthy mindset to creating their own dishes in campus size kitchens.

This is the first semester that Diane has held this kind of event series and it's full for now, but stay tuned for the next installment of Eating Healthy at GW!


For more info, email fstreet@gwu.edu.

FJA Leaders Volunteer at Sweet Virginia

Our returning Food Justice Alliance members have been working extra hard to make the beginning of this year big. As a Labor Day excursion we trekked to Gainsville, VA, to spend the day with Beekeeper Dan and the Sweet Virginia Bees.




While on the farm, we built and painted future honey bee homes. It's important that they are assembled tightly and painted meticulously, so that water, intruders, and wind don't get in.

Per Labor Day tradition, we had a FEAST of delicious end-of-summer fare, veggie burgers, sweet corn, snap peas, melon, berries, tomato & mozzarella salad, watermelon, and grilled peaches!! YUM.

Then...we played with bees! This time of year, they need to be fed. Seeing as we have taken their winter store of honey for ourselves, beekeepers feed their bees starting in August, about once a week until mid-November, then every few weeks until February. Feeding keeps the bees strong and healthy through the winter, so they can have a head start early Spring. The syrup that beekeepers feed with is usually just sugar water.

When a beekeeper opens a beehive, she first smokes the bees with a smoker. The smoke, which is just dry leaves, grass, and sometimes twine, calms the bees who's job it is to guard the hive. We don't want them thinking that we are attacking them, just poking around a little, making sure all is well inside the box.

Philanthropist Dan, who donates all honey proceeds to charity, also has a Love Through Zinnias Program. He grows hundreds of Zinnias, arranges them in vases, and gives them to hospital patients. We helped Dan pick Zinnias and he let us arrange them and take some home.

All in all, a wonderful Labor Day, filled with sun, fun, and good company.

Garden Volunteers

In-coming freshman participating in the Community Building Community Program volunteered in the garden last week.

They helped weed, harvest, and rip out plants to make room for our fall crops. All of the students were incredibly helpful and enthusiastic, it was a pleasure for Melissa and I to host and work with them. 

We had lots to give to Miriam's Kitchen

Check out these beautiful juicy tomatoes!

Garden Volunteers

The Office of Summer Session is continuing to send us wonderful volunteers every Friday morning. Here we have Andrea and Danielle. Andrea's favorite summer dish is Caprese Salad and Danielle's is fried chicken. 

Andrea and Danielle helped weed, pick vegetables, and water the beds. 

Our tomatoes are finally ready!

And of course there were a MILLION cucumbers

Fellow FJA member Sarah helped out picking the tedious and enormous lemon basil plant.

Most exciting though is the good news that the peppers and eggplant are ready to be picked!

What's Cookin'

Ricotta Goat Cheese and Herb Stuffed Squash Blossoms w/ a Balsamic Reduction

A number of weeks ago Melissa, Sarah, myself and some of our friends got together to experiment with the blossoms from our squash plant growing in the GroW Community Garden on H street. Blossoms are tender, delicate and have a hint of floral sweetness. They are easy to prepare and make a nice presentation.


There are various ways to prepare the blossoms, but a simple and favorite way of mine is to stuff them with a good cheese and then gently pan fry them. First, you want to very carefully open up the top of the flower and with tweezers, break off and remove the stamen, the long pointy thing inside the flower, which is very bitter.

I find it helpful to gently blow on the petals to help separate them from one another before trying to remove the stamen.

Stamen free

For the filling we mixed together goat cheese, ricotta, a generous handful of  fresh lemon basil, salt and pepper. But any soft cheese and herb mixture would be great. Another variation I would like to try is ricotta, freshly grated Parmesan, lemon basil, some lemon zest, salt and pepper.

The cheese and herb mixture can either be spooned into the flower or piped in. I find it easiest to fill a plastic bag with the mixture and snip off one corner to create an opening for piping. 

Fill the flower to the top

Then take the petals and wrap them together to seal the blossom so that the cheese mixture doesn't ooze out while cooking, though some will.

Here is where we made a mistake, we did not dredge the stuffed blossoms in a bit of egg before pan frying them. However, I would suggest doing so! Dredge the blossoms in egg and shake off the excess, then place the blossoms in a skillet with hot olive oil. Let them brown lightly on both sides. You can stop at this point and serve immediately as is, or you can drizzle with a balsamic reduction like we did.

Simply heat balsamic vinegar and a bit of sugar in a sauce pan until it is reduced and thick like a syrup.

Then drizzle it over the blossoms and enjoy!