GOOD NEWS: Gardens yield a ton of produce

Volunteers Marifrasier Carpenter, Jack McAuliffe and JoElla Tyree show off the produce harvested from Magnolia Community Garden ready for donation to a local food pantry. Photo provided.

The Charleston Parks Conservancy’s Magnolia Community Garden, Elliotborough Community Garden and Medway Community Garden generated 2,039 pounds of produce in 2015 for donation to local food pantries, such as Lowcountry Food Bank, One80 Place and James Island Outreach.

The community beds at each of the conservancy’s three community gardens are used for demonstration and classes. Volunteers help tend the beds and harvest the produce for donation.

Volunteers are invited to join the conservancy every Tuesday and Friday at 9:30 a.m. in Magnolia Park and Community Garden in West Ashley for Gathering in the Garden. Volunteers are needed to help maintain the community beds by watering, weeding, planting, composting and harvesting.

In other Good News:

• More airlines. Charleston International Airport set a new passenger record in 2015 and added three new airlines, according to a press release. Some 3,418,089 passengers traveled through the airport, marking the fifth consecutive year of growth. New to the airport was Alaska Airlines. Also added, but no longer operating out of Charleston, were Silver and Porter airlines. Existing airlines Delta, JetBlue and Southwest are flying bigger jets into the airport, which means more passengers in the future.

• Great storyteller to visit. Kiran Kingh Sirah, an internationally-known storyteller who is president of Tennessee’s International Storytelling Center, will speak 6 p.m. Feb. 5 at the main library on Calhoun Street in Charleston.    His presentation will focus on the role of storytelling as a tool for preventing conflict, developing communities and creating social change. You can learn how storytelling can be used to improve community relations through examples of social justice, race relations and community cooperation.  The program is part of a library series that explores race, identity and civic engagement in response to recent tragic events in the Charleston area, most notably the mass shooting at the Emanuel AME Church in June 2015, which tragically took the lives of nine Charleston residents, including long-time librarian Cynthia Graham Hurd.