Summer Lettuce Project at JGTF
Spring Blooms. Stowe Community Garden Opens for the 2025 Season
Curtains of dust are swept into the air by 30 mph gusts. Dozens of iron posts stand evenly spaced across an acre of freshly tilled soil. Plastic twine, stretched from post to post, bend with the wind, loosely marking soon-to-be-filled garden plots. Fans in the Diana Eisman Community Greenhouse hum gently just down the hill.
At 11:00 AM the gate opens, and slowly the gardeners arrive. Wind-burned staff direct each family to the square patch of soil that will be theirs for the summer. Theirs to plan, theirs to plant, theirs to grow whatever they’d like.
Elders with canes, young mothers with children, many of whom are wrapped proudly in traditional clothing of Central and East Africa, laugh and walk the perimeter of their new plots. They greet their friends, ask staff if they have any extra seed potatoes, and complain to the gardener next-door about the weather.
On the first day of April, the Stowe Community Garden opened for the season. A seldom talked about part of the larger Juniper Gardens Training Farm, Stowe Community Garden plays a separate but complimentary role to the New Roots program.
The readers of our newsletter are likely familiar with New Roots, a four year training program for refugees and immigrants, hosted at Juniper Gardens Training Farm in Northeast KCK. Co-managed by Cultivate KC and Catholic Charities of Northeast Kansas, New Roots has been putting land, tools, and materials in the hands of new Americans for 17 years. All with the goal of helping folks grow small farm businesses.
For farmers-in-training, the New Roots program is hard work. Not only do participants learn to grow food in a climate often vastly different from that in their homelands, but they learn how to market and manage a business in the United States.
All of that can be a big undertaking for many who flee their countries and find themselves resettled in Kansas City. Not everyone who comes to Juniper Gardens has the ability or desire to start a business. Some folks just want to grow food for their families or spend time with others who share their language and cultural backgrounds.
This is where the Stowe Community Garden comes in.
While open to the public, many who grow on this portion of the farm are friends or family members of New Roots farmers. Older refugees, who can be even more acutely isolated than American-born seniors, come for companionship, and to grow food from their youth. Younger gardeners, new arrivals from Africa and Southeast Asia, find friendship in a country that is still very strange, and not always welcoming.
At Cultivate KC, we believe fresh food is a human right. As stewards of the land at Juniper Gardens, we have the unique opportunity to help others with rich traditions in agriculture take control of their access to nutritious, culturally relevant food.
As important as food access is the personal and spiritual fruits that shared land, tools, and agency can foster: friendship; connection with resources; and continuation of traditions that may otherwise seem distant.
In many ways, the opening of the Stowe Community Garden is like the opening of community gardens throughout Kansas City. It is also a place for vulnerable people to find belonging at a time when headlines make belonging seem like a tall order.
