For six years, Basin’s Backyard Garden volunteers rolled up their sleeves over their lunch hours and breaks and put in the manpower to plant, tend, harvest, and donate food for people who needed it.
From 2014-2019, garden volunteers donated about 3,000 pounds of fresh vegetables to local food pantries. In 2020, the garden took a break due to COVID-19 (darn pandemic).
Coming back in 2021, the garden decided it enjoyed that work-from-home life. So this summer, the garden and its volunteers are doing their good work in a little different way. The garden isn’t grown on site at Basin Electric. During designated times, employees are bringing in their extra veggies to give and one volunteer hauls the donation to a local food pantry.
The #1 goal is to get fresh, local produce to people who need it. The Bismarck Tribune’s recent series on hunger (Hunger in Plain Sight) has shown that the need is real. Fresh local vegetables are not donated to food pantries very often, and the Hunger Free North Dakota program has done a great job over the years of making sure North Dakota summers are different.
Basin's Garden 