by Kelly Rogge, KCKCC
Students, faculty and staff at Kansas City Kansas Community College will be getting their hands dirty this week as they prepare for harvest.
Volunteers with the KCKCC Food Garden will be harvesting 150 pounds of sweet potatoes from 11 to 1 p.m. Sept. 29 at the KCKCC Campus Gardens, which are south of the Flint Building. Once the harvest is completed, KCKCC will donate the produce to Harvesters.
A part of the college’s Sustainability Master Plan, KCKCC’s Campus Garden has been part of the main campus since 2015. It includes 10 raised cedar beds, four rows of sweet potatoes and 13 fruit trees. Three of the raised beds are used by current KCKCC student and Naturally Designed owner Carolyn Marks. She uses the beds to teach students how to prepare and eat healthy food.
“Local community gardening in the many vacant lots in Wyandotte County has reached a point of critical importance as we enter an era of severely diminished economic resources,” said Curtis V. Smith, professor of biological sciences at KCKCC. “Cuts reaching $10 billion dollars to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) are being proposed in the U.S. House of Representatives latest budget proposal. The cuts will make it much harder for families and local food banks to meet food needs.”
Smith said the goal of the KCKCC Campus Gardens is to teach others about nutrition, environmental science and the health benefits of gardening. Other food products found in the garden include rainbow carrots, two types of kale, heirloom tomatoes, beets, turnips, radishes, okra, three types of lettuce and mustard greens, among others. Kansas City Community Gardens provide all of the organic seeds and mulch needed to maintain the gardens.
“Students in my nutrition and summer microbiology lab classes not only gain the opportunity to learn about gardening, good health and self-sufficiency,” Smith said. “They also use the time spent in the garden as community service hours to build their resume.”
Smith said he first used gardening as a teaching technique in 2009, when he would meet his nutrition students on Saturdays at Strawberry Hill Community Gardens in downtown Kansas City, Kan., for two hours of community service each semester. Local Master Gardeners helped train him and the students at this site for five years.
“My connection with the Master Gardeners of KCK came from serving on the Wyandotte County United Government’s Healthy Communities Wyandotte committee,” Smith said. “Healthy Communities Wyandotte has been instrumental in raising the standards of health in Wyandotte County by trying to remedy the county problem of food deserts. This local government committee was also a key stakeholder in the campus-wide movement to successfully eliminate tobacco from the KCKCC.”
For more information on the sweet potato harvest or on the KCKCC Campus Gardens, contact Smith at 913-288-7314 or by email at [email protected].