Seeds Feeds Indoor & Outdoor Gardens

On November 5th, 2020, SLP SEEDS celebrated its 5 year anniversary as a non-profit organization, and the launch of their new 5 year mission, website and name: Seeds Feeds. 

One of Seeds Feeds' goals is to grow enough year-round produce to provide to those in need within our community and to be able to sell the extra produce in order to become a self-sustaining organization. At the same time we want to be able to provide living wages and free education to our interns and apprentices who are learning about both indoor and outdoor growing. 

Seeds Feeds aims to expand our serving free and healthy produce to a larger community, but doing so requires additional space, equipment, and taking on more interns to see the gardens to fruition. We envision having the resources to make our indoor and outdoor gardens self-sustaining, and as a place for participants to share skills with each other.

The heroes of Seeds Feeds are the enthusiastic volunteers and brilliant interns who offer their time and talents to support not only our gardens, but our mission and values too. The interns are students and neighbors between eleven and seventy years old who run the gardens and distributions, as well as attend our weekly trainings in Urban Agriculture, Garden Cuisine and Food Advocacy. 

Seeds Feeds, as SLP SEEDS, has grown Food Bank Gardens and taught Soil-to-Table-to-Soil classes for 8 years. Community participants, young and not have enjoyed learning Many interns greatly enjoy seeing the fruit of their work, and some have been inspired to enter the fields of Policy or Plant Pathology as a result. 

The effects of the COVID-19 virus have provided large obstacles for Seeds Feeds, as for all the world. The pandemic has greatly increased the number of food insecure citizens in our community, and limited our ability to provide educational classes & community engagement events. 

This winter, through a grant from Hennepin County Expanded Services CARES grant, we are providing food to 3x more families than we did this past summer, which was already double what we served in 2019 from our Food Bank Gardens. Yet, we are haunted by the number of folks we are having to turn away from having enough fresh food, as organizations around the world feel, too.

That grant money ends December 30th, 2020 and our clients wonder what the winter months will provide. We have pledged to continue fundraising so we may continue serving them beyond the grant, but that means we need to extend our "emergency" warehouse lease which started May 1st and was to last only 45 days in order to get plants, seeds, DIY salad kits and garden kits, including soil and set-up for elderly or disabled. But like a hanukiah, we kept extending those 45-days and are still in our space, continuing to grow food and food growers!

This campaign's funding  will help us expand our hyper-local indoor food production, including hydroponics, aquaponics, and vertical growing practices. Interns and apprentices will learn best sustainable practices in indoor food production as well as learning the business of selling to schools, grocers and/or directly to consumers through pop-up farm stands, CSA’s and online sales.  

These funds will support our indoor-growing apprentices to earn while they learn a new and vitally important ever-"growing" industry found within hyper-local food supply chain systems.