Recognizing gardeners who give

Gardening takes effort. And getting tons and tons of fresh produce to area food pantries is no easy task.

To accomplish that every summer, though, the Giving Garden program and its more than 50 participating drop-off sites rely on the hard work and generosity of a lot of gardeners.

We asked workers at those food pantries to nominate some of their most special volunteers from this past summer's campaign. More than we could possibly ever choose as our favorites were sent in, but we narrowed the nominees down to the three people or groups who seemed to really make a difference in the lives of other people.

None of them set out to do any more than simply help other people - and grow some interesting food for themselves.

And that's what makes their stories so outstanding.

Here are our three top volunteers from the 2006 Giving Garden campaign.

Caring for family

Jesse Suarez takes good care of his family members.

He makes sure they have the essentials - food, water, shelter - and lots of room to grow.

He proudly shows them off to his co-workers, even strangers, then usually donates them to charity.

Charity?

Well, yeah. When you're a family member in the Oak Grove School custodian's world, you've likely got a name like Brandywine, Wonder Bell or Straight Eight.

"I think this is my family," he says of the five large garden beds in the Green Oaks school's courtyard.

Suarez cultivates, nurtures and shares fruits and vegetables from gardens at the school not only with his friends, but those he knows need some extra assistance. For many years, the food was given to a soup kitchen. This year Suarez added the Libertyville Township food pantry to his vegetable delivery rounds.

"He loves to give to people," said Mark Clement, Oak Grove Junior High principal. "He will search people out to share what he has toiled over all summer. I would say the greatest joy (I see) is (when) he is giving it away."

Students about a decade ago planted several garden beds as a school project. But as children often do, they moved on to something else, wavering in their support for the gardens and their potential.

That just wasn't an option for Suarez, who saw an unbelievable opportunity.

The 58-year-old Mexican immigrant had a strong background in farming and gardening and, once he accepted the task of caring for the beds, set about making them extraordinarily productive.

"The main thing is dedication," he said through his son, Oswaldo, also a maintenance worker at the school.

Suarez gets bonus points for creativity, too.

"He's very resourceful. He used an old volleyball net for the cucumbers," Clement said.

Regardless of how he gets the food to grow so well, he's assured it's going to a good cause.

The donations make it possible "for our food pantry recipients to receive healthy, nutritious produce during the growing season, which they might not be able to afford to purchase," said Linda Blatnik, a social worker at the township food pantry.

It's a group effort

Year One of the great Pantry Garden experiment wasn't exactly prolific.

After a whopping 1 pounds of radishes and lettuce, no one was ready to go out and book grocery space.

Five years later, though, the pace of things has stepped up quite a bit. Using a crew of between six and eight people, the Schaumburg Community Garden Club harvested more than 1,600 pounds of fresh, nutritious produce this summer for the Schaumburg Township Food Pantry.

"It's very satisfying. I know we're helping out and everybody who does it feels that," garden coordinator Dean Bruckner said.

Each year, the garden club works on six plots donated by the Schaumburg Park District, planting a crop of vegetables designed to mature throughout the season: lettuce, beans, peppers, carrots, beets, onions, broccoli, eggplant, zucchini, winter, summer squash and cucumbers.

While food pantry clients generally are allowed to stop in every six weeks, they can come in any time throughout the summer to pick up the vegetables donated through the Giving Garden program.

"There's a high demand for it," Bruckner said.

Aside from the fact that it helps residents stretch their meals further during the interim between visits, it builds friendships.

"It starts off conversations in the waiting area," said Lin Greidanus, township associate director of welfare services. "Someone will say 'what do you do with it' and someone (else) will say 'oh, I know.' It makes for a friendlier atmosphere."

In five years, club members have delivered more than 7,500 pounds of fresh, nutritious food to township residents in need.

Feeding the masses

Some people's houses are smaller than Dicie Hansen's garden.

"It's about 2,000 square feet this year ... it got a little out of hand," the Lake Barrington woman admits.

With so many varieties to plant, though, how's a gardener to resist the temptation?

"I want to grow particular things ...," she said, explaining why she even starts most of her garden from seed indoors under grow lights. "This was my big year for getting rid of old seeds."

Though she supplies quite a few people - her parents, her sister's family, her neighbors, the garden club - she still swims in a virtual sea of vegetables each summer as harvests roll in.

The staff at the Cuba Township food pantry even joke that they lock their doors at night so Dicie can't drop off any surprise zucchini.

They aren't joking, though, in calling her their "gardening angel."

"Every week, Dicie's wonderful parents (our "delivery angels" come in and bring us heaps of Dicie's beautiful fresh produce. Year after year it starts with beets and greens, then beans, Swiss chard, kohlrabi and multicolored beans. This year Dicie graced our grateful residents with a huge variety of heirloom tomatoes such as Brandywine," general assistance coordinators Kate Formichella and Cheryl Tanaka said in a letter praising Hansen's accomplishments.

She's been gardening all her life.

"My mother is a gardener, so from a very small age I have been in the dirt," she said. "As I've gotten older, my mother's gotten out of the vegetable-growing business for the family and I've taken over."

Unfortunately, as she lives in a townhouse, there were space limitations to her gardening dreams. Luckily, she had a friend with a lot of property and a garden laying fallow.

When she offered it for Hansen's use, she didn't hesitate.

It's hard even to imagine everything she's got growing there: in addition to those items listed by the pantry, Hansen also grows spinach, peas, lettuce, cucumbers, four kinds of summer squash, 10 kinds of green beans, eggplant, peppers, corn, flowers and oodles of tomatoes.

To say she was ecstatic to find the food pantry is an understatement.

"When you have that much stuff to give away, you're just happy to find someone to take it," she jokes. "That's why you make a lot of friends in the winter so you have more people to give zucchini and tomatoes in the summer. Really, I'm serious."