Late risers were disappointed when they showed up for Soil Born’s newest farm stand in McKinley Park on Saturday. By 10:30, the stand had sold out of beets, carrots, green beans, cucumbers, apricots and blackberries. Only potatoes and okra were left by noon, so Randy Stannard, Soil Born Farm’s food access coordinator, turned shoppers away, promising to triple the amount of fruits and vegetables next week. “We’ll have to make it bigger,” Stannard said. “We had an amazing response. People are just really excited to be able to have something down here in the park.” Soil Born chose McKinley Park for its stand because of its popularity. “Many people, a diverse amount of people, use the park

Starting this coming Saturday, Soil Born Farms will operate a farm stand in front of the library at McKinley Park in East Sacramento. The stand will sell fruit and vegetables grown by farmers in Sacramento, Yolo, Placer, El Dorado, Yuba, Sutter, Solano and San Joaquin counties. Randy Stannard, Soil Born's food access coordinator, is heading up the stand. It is one of many food-delivery models that the farm is using to bring healthy, locally grown food to the community. "Instead of bringing ten to 20 farmers to one spot, we go to the farms and we basically buy and resell produce as well as our own," Stannard said, comparing the stand to a farmers market. The stand is one component of sev

Sacramento is nicknamed the "City of Trees" for a reason. Even in its most urban core, the city is filled with fruit trees. So what happens when those trees produce more fruit than the owners can harvest, let alone eat? One option is to let Harvest Sacramento take care of it. This year alone, the group has collected more than 13,000 pounds of fruit from the Sacramento area, all of which goes to the Sacramento Food Bank. Harvest Sacramento organized a Midtown Fruit Harvest on Saturday in which 25 community volunteers helped pick more than 1,300 pounds of citrus for the food bank. In just three hours, the group collected grapefruit, oranges, lemons and kumquats from nine houses in the grid

Students help harvest fruit from neighbors to supply area food banks Gleaning effort facing possible shut down   By Maria L. Lopez & Randy Stannard Saturday, Feb. 20, 2010 at 9:30 a.m. More than 50 students from Theodore Judah Elementary School and community volunteers will walk from their McKinley Park area campus to harvest fruit from their neighbors’ yards for local food banks on Saturday, Feb.20. Volunteers will receive an orientation at 9 a.m. and expect to begin walking to residences by 9:30. Judah is located at 3919 McKinley Blvd. Last weekend, volunteers walked to neighbors’ homes to ask for permission to gather the fruit. Randy Stannard of Harvest Sacramento, and a coordinato