Opening Day At Harvesters Demonstration Garden

Many volunteers helped weed, till and plant the Harvesters Demonstration Garden today. Located at the Harvesters facility at 3801 Topping in Kansas City, Mo, the garden is intended to make individuals or agencies say “I can do that!” All food in the garden is used in Harvesters nutrition education programs.When we arrived at 9am, the garden was full of weeds and dead leaves and needed a lot of help!
The garden needs helpers besides humans; look where the finger points to see the bumblebee who pollinated our apple tree.
First, we dug out all the weeds and put them on the compost pile.
We then tilled the soil to create a nice bed for seeds to easily germinate. The garden had been weeded and tilled by 11:30am!
We created our own potting soil for our containers by mixing perlite, compost and soil together in equal amounts.
We planted "cool season" crops that can withstand a light frost as our average last frost date in Kansas City is April 15. We planted seeds of lettuce, spinach, cilantro, swiss chard, turnips, mustard greens, parsley, beets, carrots and peas. We also planted onion sets, seed potatoes (which are parts of or whole potatoes) and plants which had been started a few weeks ago in the greenhouse: lettuce, brussel sprouts, cabbage (red and green), broccoli and collards.

We'll plant "warm season" vegetables around Mother's Day, including tomatoes, peppers and beans.