Gardener provides campaign with steady supply of veggies

Chubby cucumbers are the veggies du jour in George Tresnak's Elburn garden.

He doesn't grow skinny ones - just big chubby ones. And they grow in abundance.

That's a good thing for the Northern Illinois Food Bank in St. Charles. Tresnak delivers bushels of cucumbers to the Plant a Row for the Hungry drop-off site, sometimes several times a week.

Though it's been a cool summer and vegetable crops aren't ripening at their usual pace, Tresnak already has dropped off more than 120 pounds of fresh food this season.

"We just have an excess of vegetables, so we thought it would be good to take them to the food pantry," said Tresnak's wife Darlene. "It's one way to help people."

Plant a Row for the Hungry is a campaign promoted nationally by the Garden Writers Association. It's sponsored locally by the Daily Herald and Northern Illinois Food Bank. The campaign urges gardeners to plant a little extra in their plots and deliver the excess to area food pantries and soup kitchens.

Historically, the Tresnaks didn't have much surplus; the 10-by-20-foot garden they cultivated at their former Streamwood home was sufficient for their family. When they moved to Elburn and expanded their garden substantially, though, they found out just how much more food they could produce.

The couple planted beets, radishes, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions and peppers in their new 30-by-55-foot plot. They wound up with a lot of all of those vegetables.

At first they shared them with their neighbors, but that only lasted for so long.

"They can't use so many of them," Darlene Tresnak said.

So, rather feed people who already have enough to eat, they chose to donate to people who have difficulty putting food on the table.

And as 1 pound of produce provides an estimated four servings of food, that's 480 servings of fresh vegetables they've already dished out so far this summer.