Fresh For All: Healthy Heirloom Gardens

5801 West 135th Street,Overland Park KS 66223

20 November, 2021

Description

We're getting together to pool resources and help more families grow their own food from any location with soil around their neighborhoods. This is a short lunch charrette for agronomists, horticulturalist consultants and organization representatives interested in collaborating to expand on the pre-COVID success of the Neighbor Grown Food Network. The goal: analyze reasons behind past success of the program, and put together a first draft of "who can do what" to make instructional resources and heirloom Midwest-sourced dry-field seeds available to low-income households wanting to grow their own fresh foods in the soil spaces around their homes. Clement Waters Retreat is shooting for collaborative publication and distribution of household growing guides in March 2022. In 2018 and 2019 the Neighbor Grown Food Network delivered in-person instructions, seeds and seedlings to 15 pilot households in low-income neighborhoods around the Kansas City metro. After a season of companion planting and seed saving, there was bountiful harvest to share and seeds to save. After the first year, people had enough knowledge about organic dry-field low-input food gardening that they used "an abundance" of saved seeds to grow even more. After the program's pause due to the pandemic, households are still reporting expansion of shared resources, block by block. Environment and equity nonprofit Clement Waters earned 501c3 status in 2014 and has been working to help people understand practical applications of sustainability ever since. Learn more about our work at www.clementwaters.org