Board & Committees

Mary is a lifelong gardener who planted and picked far too many Kentucky Wonder green beans growing up in Michigan and ever since looks for ways to make gardening tasks less back-breaking or boring. Like many gardeners, she's had her heart broken by crop failure in the fall only to be revived each year with the arrival of the first seed catalog. While she still drools over the biggest squash, she only plants what will grow the best in NW conditions and can be preserved for her household to use over winter. As the Boat School garden manager, she relies on Grow Veg.com and simple Google Doc reports to automate the needs of the raised beds and volunteers.

Blending her needs for fresh food with less back-breaking effort, Mary has a 10x25 foot Aquaponics greenhouse at home. Each day the goldfish water from a 300 gallon tank cycles through gravel feeding plants and returns cleaned up into the tank. Her most productive plants are tomatoes, cucumbers, Basil, and brassicas all growing away with no need to weed, feed, or worry about animals or pests. This year, seedlings for the several gardens will be gracing the floor. 

Mary can be reached at maryclarehunt@gmail.com

Amber began volunteering with the Food Bank Growers in 2023 after she moved to Port Townsend from Seattle. She manages a successful Food Bank Growers garden, Brian’s

Garden, that sends their haul to the Brinnon Food Bank.

With a Bachelors Degree in Environmental Design, Amber has passion for and experience with the plant world. In Seattle, she had a career in the video game industry,

worked as a line cook for some popular restaurants and dabbled as a spice merchant.  She also regularly volunteered with Tilth Alliance.  

One of the main reasons Amber relocated to the Quimper Peninsula was to be closer to locally grown food. For the past three years, she has been getting her hands dirty

volunteering all around the peninsula. Amber is a regular volunteer with the Jefferson

County Farmers Market, is a certified Master Gardener in Jefferson County and gleans from farms to help prepare community meals at the Chimacum Grange.

Growing food for health, community and security is her heartbeat. Amber, and her best

friend Lindsay, coordinate the North Beach Community Garden. They are also known as “Two Gals and Some Goats” and are a part of the farm cooperative at Natembea where

they use their goats to help with land management on the farm. Amber also works in the produce department at the Port Townsend Food Co-Op.

Emmy Lou didn't start out in the glitzy world of high finance and Quick Books, she was a nurse for most of her life and learned how to manage organizational money when their neighborhood community garden formed. She and her husband Phil Andrus  share 42 acres south of Chimacum which they co-own with five other households (10 people) called "Trillium A Land Trust". Emmy Lou is the treasurer and also the treasurer for another neighborhood group, the Four Creeks Community Association.

Anyone can learn QuickBooks, but Emmy Lou knows what it takes to keep communal operations humming along and that's invaluable to the Food Bank Growers. She brings a reality check to every decision. In a way she's doing what she's always done, but instead of keeping patients healthy, she's keeping our finances healthy.

Milly is a retired electrical engineer who's father grew up on a wheat farm and always had a garden. Currently Milly co-manages the Fairwinds Food Bank Garden which delivers food to the Port Townsend Food Bank.  Milly is loving life in this lush green forested ecosystem which is something she dreamed of all during her younger years in the desert Southwest (New Mexico and then Arizona), and is thrilled to be part of a community that cares so much about each other.

Milly also serves on the Steering Committee of Kul Kah Han Native Plant Garden in Chimacum, and volunteers at the Salish Coast Production garden, the Buck Lake Native Plant Garden in Hansville, and with the Jefferson Land Trust.  Milly and her husband Keith maintain ties to the Native Seeds/SEARCH seed bank, Tohono Chul, and Mission Garden in Tucson among other organizations. She also serves on the board for the Tucson Bird Alliance.

Milly is passionate about doing what's in her abilities to help the earth heal itself from human caused damage; environmental, ecological, and other.  She believes that healthy, nutritious, locally grown food grown using sustainable practices is one of many cogs in the wheel of maintaining a healthy ecosystem, community and life.  The Food Bank Growers organization is going a long way to providing food security and wellness in this community and Milly is proud to be a part of it.

Food security and farming/gardening have been my focus and passion for the last 15 years. I have been committed to do all that I can to help people in my community eat healthy food as well as learn to grow their own food.

In 2011, I became a Master Gardener through the Los Angeles County Master Gardener program. The focus of the program was teaching individuals to cultivate their own food, and to establish and support school gardens, community gardens, and gardens at shelters for battered

women, unhoused individuals, and underserved communities.  After relocating to Jefferson County in 2016, I sought opportunities to continue this work and discovered the local Food Bank Garden community. I was the first grower of vegetables for the Birchyville Food Bank garden.

My involvement with the Food Bank Growers led to a collaboration with the Seed Library of Jefferson County. Alongside its founder, Karen Seabrook, I helped establish and run the Seed Library. This initiative, affiliated with Washington State University (WSU) and the Jefferson

County Library, provides locally adapted seeds to gardeners and seed savers to enhance regional biodiversity and resilience. Our work fosters a communal approach to seed saving, aiming to build a robust network of contributors who support genetic diversity and adaptability in

our local seed stock.

I currently volunteer at Fairwinds Food Bank Garden and lead a new Propatation effort in the Quimper Grange greenhouse, germinating seeds and growing starts for several of the Food Bank Gardens.

Paulette is your garden variety community member with a big love for Mother Earth

especially in the form of a vegetable garden. She is a volunteer at the Salish Coast Garden, and

is keeping an eye out for more opportunities to support FBG. She sees the FBG mission as a

practical opportunity to build community.

Suzanne works remotely as a biostatistician at a medical device company, and has two adult children who live in Seattle. She has been involved with Quimper Community Harvest (also known as the gleaners, part of the Food Bank Growers organization) as one of the organizers for the last 4 years. Aside from picking lovely fruit, she works on the spreadsheets that help the organization to get fruit quickly to people in need as well as tracking the amounts of fruit that we collect. She feels that our community will be stronger and more resilient in the face of many types of challenges if we have a robust and equitable food system that we all contribute to.  She loves growing her own food and foraging for plants and mushrooms, and loves that she lives in a place where she can build connections with her neighbors while she does those things.