Not all farm-to-table efforts are at restaurants: the Cupertino De Anza Lions Club has partnered with local nonprofits to get fresh produce to West Valley residents suffering from food insecurity.

A year ago, Lions Joan Chin and Dagi Zimdahl spearheaded an effort to restore the garden at Via West, a camp for boys and girls with social cognitive challenges run by Via Services at Stevens Creek County Park.

“We organized a small team of club members to clean everything up and start planting in late July” of 2020, Chin recalls. “Since July, we have grown food continuously.”

Since the first harvest last fall, the Lions have been donating produce from the Via Lions Co-op Garden to West Valley Community Services, a Cupertino-based nonprofit that provides food and rental assistance to local residents.

“Our harvests have been steadily increasing from month to month,” Chin says, “with the most recent month yielding 363 bags of greens, root crops, vine crops and herbs. We bag our produce, putting the amount of each crop needed to create a dish for a family of four.

“Our gardening methods follow organic practices to keep the food as healthy as possible,” she adds.

While Cupertino Lions already volunteered regularly at Via West, Chin says bringing the garden back to life helped keep the club focused during the pandemic, when many other activities had to be cancelled. In the past year, members of the Lions club have completed several upgrades to both the greenhouse and garden plots, expanding the growing space to about 1,000 square feet and adding a drip irrigation system.

Chin says she and her volunteers still have a lot to learn about what grows best in the Cupertino foothills.

“We aim to keep track of our results, continuously improve and determine which are our best crops for production purposes and which crops are the most desired by our clients,” she adds. “Another aspect of growing in this location is the microclimate, which runs both hotter and colder than in the Valley, so starting plants according to first and last average frost dates is currently guesswork. We are logging this year’s temperatures as a guide for next year.”

The Lions are also making plans to welcome Via West campers back to the garden when the facility reopens.

“When the garden and greenhouse were installed at the Via West campus,” Chin says, “the vision was to give the young campers an experience of seeing food growing, eating food grown in the garden at the meals served to the campers, learning about the environment and how ecosystems work, practicing garden tasks and doing experiments, and so on.

“Once the camp programs are back, the garden’s first priority will be to serve those purposes at the camp. Any extra produce will go to West Valley (Community Services), which I expect will still be substantial.”