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NONPROFIT
Community gardens support
Food Bank expansion
A Special to San Antonio Medicine
In 2007 when
the San Antonio
Food Bank moved
to its current loca- pounds of produce over those first years, with
tion at Hwy 151
and Old U.S.
Hwy 90, one of
the benefits the or-
ganization envisioned was
once again putting a till in
the soil that was for decades part of one of
the largest and most respected of the old Bel-
gian farms on the City’s Westside: the Van-
derwalle Farm.
The Food Bank began tilling the old Van-
derwalle farm first with a modest, two-acre
community garden, generously supported
with help from our San Antonio
Spurs. Thousands of volunteers helped sup-
28 San Antonio Medicine • November 2015
port the Spurs Community Garden for its
first five years. The volunteers tilled, planted, of the campus just between the Food Bank
pruned, and harvested tens of thousands of
each and every pound being used to nourish
a hungry individual in San Antonio.
Simultaneous to establishing the Spurs
Community Garden, the Food Bank also
began to cultivate a half-acre teaching gar-
den. The teaching garden aims to educate the
local community with all the basics of build-
ing and maintaining a modest garden at one’s
own home, school, or business. Hundreds of
local children, youth, and adults have visited
the teaching garden and learned first-hand
the joys and responsibilities of cultivating
and maintaining their own garden.
When the Food Bank went into expansion
mode in 2012-2013, the Spurs Community
Garden was plowed up and moved to a part
and the City’s Animal Care Services com-
plex. The new and improved garden, which
reopened in 2013, also anchors the Harvey
Najim Children’s Pavilion. The Pavilion was
built as a large outdoor market structure,
harkening back to the area’s original roots in
farming. Today, the Pavilion is used by vol-
unteers who work the Community Garden
(bathrooms, lockers, shade, tool storage, and
picnic tables), as well as being home to a
monthly Farmers’ Market one Saturday a
month. The Farmers’ Market features pro-
duce from the Community Garden along
with other produce from local farmers.
Two tremendous “green”energy strategies
support the Community Garden. First, the
Food Bank has a wind turbine in the mid-