Transcript

Location: Kane Street Community Garden 

If I was looking at the garden the first couple years, before the apartment complex was built, you would be standing on Kane Street and you would look up kind of a hill. There was a garden space there with a bunch of plants and then a little shed. People often didn’t use the fresh fruits and vegetables available to them, because they didn’t know how to cook them, they weren’t used to eating them. And so we felt that it was really important to have cooking classes and that kind of educational programming to help people use what was grown there. We grew tomatoes and potatoes and green beans, and those weren’t hard to give away, but even things like carrots. I remember being up there one day and a mom had her teenage daughter with her. And on the table were a bunch of carrots that had just been pulled out of the ground. And so they were somewhat dirty. You know, we wipe stuff off but there was still dirt on it. And the young woman with her mom looked at them and goes, “ooooh, what are those?” And her mother looks at her and she goes, “They’re carrots!” And she goes, “But they’re all dirty!” You know, and she’s used to seeing them at the store, cleaned off, in a little cellophane bag. And we just kind of chucked. Her mom picked them up and said, “We’re having them for dinner.” [laughs] So this whole idea of having produce that people can access and not necessarily have to purchase, it’s a great thing for our community. My name is Linda Lee. I was, at the time the garden formed, I was the nutrition manager for the La Crosse County Health Department.