Making our Schoolyard Gardens grow; kids' Thanksgiving harvest dreams start here

What it’s all about: Children celebrate their work (left to right) at Cler-Mont Elementary in Fort Osage, and Holliday Montessori and Troost Elementary in Kansas City Public Schools. Photos courtesy Kansas City Community Gardens.

July’s sun was mounting the sky toward a 100-plus-degree heat index.

But Hartman Elementary School LINC Caring Communities Site Coordinator Martin Jackson mopped his head with a towel and put his thoughts on Thanksgiving.

By then, he said, these wood-framed beds of soil that LINC staff were building with the Kansas City Community Gardens Schoolyard Gardens team will have been planted, watered and nurtured by LINC’s after-school kids.

KCCG and LINC workers build new Schoolyard Garden beds at Hartman Elementary School July 29.

Who knows what all they will decide to grow? Carrots, broccoli, collard greens, tomatoes, peppers, sweet potatoes?

Once the children arrive for the new school year, “we will start almost immediately . . . learning the process of gardening,” Jackson said, “so that by the time Thanksgiving comes we will have vegetables produced right here from this garden that students can take home and actually eat.”

The new Hartman Elementary garden is one of 18 plots at LINC Caring Communities sites — among the more than 200 that Kansas City Community Gardens (KCCG) has helped start in its Schoolyard Gardens program across the Kansas City area.

LINC programs and KCCG are also tending to a dozen Giving Grove fruit tree orchards.

“It’s really a great way to be healthy,” said Hannah Ebling-Artz, KCCG’s program director of Schoolyard Gardens, “because you’re active, out working the soil, and I think veggies just taste better when you grow them yourself.”

LINC and many of its partner schools have embraced the Schoolyard Gardens program as a way to help kids and their families learn how to grow and harvest fruits and vegetables, gain enthusiasm for healthy diets, and carry that same spirit into the surrounding community.

“The reason Kansas City Community Garden exists,” Ebling-Artz said, “is to increase access to low-cost fruits and vegetables. We especially want to connect with folks who are low-income who just want to grow their own vegetables.”

The KCCG team has been joining with LINC staff at various sites as the new school year approaches, building new garden beds or tending and preparing existing beds.

At Hartman, that meant hammering wood frames together and wheelbarrowing a dump truck’s load of dark soil into the beds and raking them smooth. At other sites, including Troost Elementary and Foreign Language Academy, that meant repairing wood frames, weeding and clearing old beds to be ready for new planting.

Hot work for sure, but it’s worth preparing the way for what becomes a unifying community experience for children and adults.

“What I like the most,” Jackson said, “is that we all have to work together to produce the fruit of the garden.”

By Joe Robertson/LINC writer

Video edited by Bryan Shepard

Giving Grove orchards at LINC schools

Hale Cook

Center

Richardson Early Childhood

Woodland Early Childhood

Border Star Montessori

Butcher-Greene

Grandview Middle

Buckner

Cler-Mont

Elm Grove

Carver

Phillips

LINC program Schoolyard Gardens

Belvidere

Buckner

Conn-West

Ervin

Faxon

Garfield

Gladstone

Hale Cook

Hartman

Holliday Montessori

Ingels

Longfellow

King

Pitcher

Garcia

Smith-Hale

Troost

Warford