Food & Agriculture
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Community Gardening
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Our residential community on Mirabeau Avenue includes garden beds, planter boxes, and a small greenhouse built by our Headway participants.
With the building of our new Veteran Wellness Center, we’re developing a new community garden closer to the center for educational workshops.
Growing our own food allows us to:
- Supplement our community’s Food Pantry with fruits, vegetables, and herbs
- Provide fresh produce for our Resident Chefs to utilize in community meals
- Include community-grown ingredients in our Headway cooking groups
- Learn, grow, and adapt as we explore new agricultural practices
Our Agricultural Partners
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- Recirculating Farms is a 501(c)3 non-profit collaboration of farmers, educators, and activists committed to building an equitable food system from farm to fork to provide fresh, local, accessible food and create stable green jobs.
- The experts at Recirculating Farms have been an integral part of Bastion’s community garden development and have provided critical skills and knowledge for our community members. Through events both on-site at Bastion and off-site at farms around the community, our friends from Recirculating Farms teach veterans how to grow, harvest, and cook their own food, plus provide education about sustainable farming practices, food safety, fresh produce storage tips, and so much more.
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- NOLA Tree Project transforms lives and communities through tree plantings and community service projects.
- Nola Tree Project has helped plant dozens of trees across Bastion’s residential community providing beauty, shade, and even some fruits for our community members.
Exploring Agricultural Sustainability
Bastion’s dedicated staff and community partners have led multiple initiatives to make our community greener and more sustainable.
What Is Hydroponics?
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Hydroponics is a way of growing plants quickly and efficiently without using soil or dirt. This growing method uses just water with balanced nutrients, sunlight, and pH levels to grow healthy and nutritious produce.
Hydroponic growing has several benefits which include:
• Grows plants at rapid speeds
• Provides larger amounts of healthier produce
• Low maintenance: only requires weekly water
• Checks to monitor water pH and nutrient levels
• Improved pest and disease control
Implementation at Bastion
Bastion’s Headway veterans attended several education sessions at Recirculating Farms, where they learned about the benefits and techniques of hydroponic growing. Through the generous donations of the City Park Gardening Club, Bastion obtained an eight tower growing system. This system pumps water and organic nutrient solution up from the bottom tray and circulates through small nozzles which continuously stream down the towers to feed the plants. Led by Occupational Therapist Caity Bower, Headway veterans and volunteers built a new teal wooden rack with wheels, to ensure our ability to move the growing tower based on our needs.
We’ve also installed multiple tabletop hydroponic systems in our residential community center. These are smaller systems similar to our tower system, that will also be used to grow more herbs/produce for our food pantry.
What is Composting?
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Composting is the natural process of recycling organic matter, such as leaves and food scraps, into a valuable fertilizer that can enrich soil and plants.
Behind our residential community center, we’ve developed a composting station where we put all of our organic waste. This includes scraps of produce from our community garden, discarded cardboard, and trimmed materials from our community garden. Recirculating Farms hosts workshops at Bastion where our veterans learn more about the compost process and the experts help us rebalance our compost to yield nutritious, fertile soil for our gardens.