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. At the time—this was 1998—we had an influx of Hmong families coming in to the city of La Crosse. And the Hmong used, obviously, a lot of the vegetables that we grow in the U.S., but they also, when they came over, they brought seeds with them. And many of them lived in apartments and really didn’t have land that they could grow a garden on. The second year we were in existence, we set aside a couple plots of land for the Hmong to use to plant their seeds. And initially we thought, “well, we’ll just give them garden plots.” But it was easier to keep the concept of a community garden going. Every Hmong family that came up could use, you know, some of that produce. And we did talk with a lot of Hmong families about, “what should we grow?” You know, “what, what would you like to see us grow?” And so some of the seeds, we made sure that we had in the garden. 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.