Giving and learning

Little and big hands controlled the stream of water.

The younger hands, belonging to the 5-year-old boy serving as the day's helper, were fixing to hold the garden hose in a single spot in hopes of making an Olympic-sized pool.

"You don't hold it in one place, you spread it around," Duard Smith, 76, cautioned, wary of letting his charge wash away soil protecting roots of newly planted seedlings.

There was a time, not so long ago, when such activities straddling the generational divide took place regularly in back yards and gardens across the area.

It's still happening each week on a little plot of land in Arlington Heights, within the confines of a sparkling new picket fence, where little ones and their elders are growing something important.

They're passing on lessons extended families living under one roof once took for granted: Nurture things you care about. Work with nature's cycles. Help your neighbors.

"We wanted to promote togetherness between the two generations," explained Vicki Schlomann, director of the Cherished Place Adult Day Care Club. "We also wanted to teach children to do something together and ... to donate."

Members of the club, who have varying degrees of memory impairment, rotate through the garden activity as do 4- and 5-year-old children in the Shepherd's Flock day care program. The club's focus is to help older people stay in their own homes longer by stimulating brain and physical activity.

Gardening hits both areas, Schlomann said.

In addition to its role as an intergenerational tool, the garden is also part of a larger program - Plant a Row for the Hungry. It's a campaign the Daily Herald again is sponsoring this year to encourage readers to help some of the area's neediest residents.

The program, organized nationally by the Garden Writers Association, urges gardeners to plant a little extra and take the surplus harvest to more than 40 participating food pantries in Cook, Lake, DuPage, Kane and McHenry counties. They stand ready and waiting to receive the fresh food during this year's collection, which runs July 12 to Sept. 28.

Since 1999, area gardeners have sent more than 130,000 pounds of fresh vegetables to local food pantries and soup kitchens.

This year, we're setting a goal of gathering 45,000 pounds. Last year's donors came close, dropping off more than 41,600 pounds of food. We're convinced that 45,000 goal is attainable, so we're bringing it back.

The little 20-foot-square garden in Arlington Heights produced enough last year, during its trial run, to send volunteers to the Wheeling Township pantry with armloads of tomatoes and cucumbers, Schlomann said. They expanded the lineup this year to include several varieties of tomatoes, eggplants, beans, peppers, radishes and carrots.

The need for assistance at food pantries is very real. Most area agencies report sharp increases in the past few years as more and more companies have laid off workers in response to the slow economy.

Demand for assistance is up about 24 percent at agencies affiliated with the Greater Chicago Food Depository, which includes most pantries in Cook County, said Barbara J. Whicker, director of marketing for the food bank.

On the distribution level, the food bank passed out about 25,000 pounds of produce daily to social service agencies, with about 1.2 million pounds annually given to residents through its mobile produce truck. But that truck primarily serves areas in need within the city of Chicago. Suburban residents often are not the beneficiaries.

Like its city-based counterpart, Northern Illinois Food Bank in St. Charles, which co-sponsors Plant a Row for the Hungry locally along with the Daily Herald, is on target to distribute 15 million pounds of food to its agencies in 12 northern counties. And the vast majority of that is nonperishable food, said Mary Hayes, assistant executive director of the food bank. She estimates 250,000 people per month are seeking food assistance from the 300-plus agencies the food bank assists.

This year, for the first time, food pantry clients in the suburbs are specifically asking about the fruits and vegetables gardeners have donated in recent years, said Mel Runzel, who runs Hanover Township's program.

That's music to the ears of Schlomann and her crew. They're counting on delivering a bumper crop of beans.