GARDEN RAISES MAN

by Angie Mullins

This article was also posted in theHazard Herald.

Don Maggard raises a garden.

Lately, though, he realized his garden has raised him up too.

Maggard, 63, worked underground in the coal mines for 37 years. After a lifetime of hard work, his back finally gave out and he had surgery five years ago.

He hasn’t been able to work in mining ever since so he felt he had no choice but to apply for disability benefits. He was essentially forced to retire at 58 years old, something the active and motivated man would never have dreamed he’d do.

“The hardest part,” he said, “was having nothing to do.”

Boredom led to depression.

His life had lost its meaning. He had a loving family, church and good friends, but he was sad because he felt useless.

Out of long habit, he continued to get up at 4:30 every morning and then had nowhere to go.

Then, after a year or so, he decided to expand his family garden.

He joined theGrow Appalachiaat Cowan Community Center organization and began to explore new options.

Now, he is a regular seller at the farmer’s market, makes a good supplemental income, and has found a new lease on life.

“I just love watching it grow. I’d do it if I didn’t make a dime,” he said.

“But I wish I could have gotten into this a long time ago and not just depended solely on mining. The way mining is, it’s so up and down.”

He found plenty of things to do to occupy his time too. He attended canning classes, and has taken field trips with the Grow Appalachia group to other farming operations where he learned about organic fertilization, pest control and different crop covers.

He earned a Micro-processing certification to enable him to sell canned goods and a certification for home-based processing for candies and breads and other such home-made products. He’s working on getting a Farm Number which makes him eligible for grants to expand his farm with better equipment.

He will sell his canned goods under the brand, “Sweet Don’s Corn”.

He sold plenty of that corn this year, 20 bushels of green beans, kale, potatoes, cabbage, onions, lettuce, 10 bushels of tomatoes, mustard greens, kushaw, beets, pumpkins, swiss chard, eggplant, spaghetti squash, cauliflower, butternut squash, basil and oregano at the Farmers Market. Really anything he took down there sold well, he said.

Now, he is working on expanding his Farmers Market offerings with about 40 fruit trees that should bear fruit in the next 2-3 years, and is interested in trying some nut trees.

That’s not all. He sells the roots and medicinal herbs he finds in the woods such as ginseng to dealers and has researched the process for making homemade hominy with his corn this year.

Even his health is better.

He walks to his garden, which is about a half mile from his house on Big Branch in Perry County, twice a day. He believes the exercise keeps him healthy and that his back pain would be much worse if he didn’t keep moving. His back hurts worse in the winter when he can’t walk or tend his garden.

He still sometimes needs help from his three grandsons, or his daughter Abigail Maggard, who is a co-manager of theFarmers Marketin Letcher County.

But he enjoys that part: showing the younger generations how to plant and tend and reap food from their own land with their own hands.

“They need to see what you can benefit from growing a garden,” he said.

He is the seventh of twelve kids raised in the aftermath of the Great Depression when a garden was critical to keeping a big family fed.

“If we had another depression, I don’t know what the young people would do,” he said. “They would starve to death.”

Besides the financial and health benefits, gardening and selling at the Farmers Market brought him other benefits such as friendship with the other farmers, boosting the local economy, and teaching the kids about a healthy way of life.

“They can buy straight from the garden, not straight from a can,” Maggard said. “We need to show them that.”

Perhaps most would agree, that with everything he has overcome, there is plenty that Don Maggard could teach.

NEW YEARS RESOLUTION BECOMES REALITY FOR COMMUNITY GARDENS IN HAZARD, KENTUCKY

This piece was also published in theFloyd County Times.

by Karyn Knecht

For two women in Hazard, Kentucky, creating community gardens started as a New Years resolution. Jenny Williams, an English professor, was hosting a New Years party when she voiced her desire for community gardens in Hazard.

That’s when Aly Cooper, a VISTA for the Kentucky Mountain Health Alliance, said, “Let’s just do it.”

And they did.

Two years later, they’ve harvested about 750 pounds of food. That produce has been donated to several local organizations: Corner Haven Crisis Shelter, Little Flower Clinic, Journey Church’s Food Pantry, STARLand Academy, and New Beginnings Learning Center.

A local non-profit, Pathfinders of Perry County, funds the project. As the Chair of the Board, Williams believes gardening and nutrition education are crucial to improving the region.

“I’ve tried to be a food advocate, an advocate for people growing their own food, for money or health. And I fell into that, that’s not why I started. I just like food. I like to cook. As I became more aware of what was going on in our region, I felt more strongly about it,” said Williams.

“The whole time I’ve been teaching at the college – for 21 years now – I have always had my students write about food, talk about food, and read about food.”

During class discussions, Williams noticed a trend among her students. “I’ll ask them, who here knows where your food came from? Who has a garden? And at first, more than half the students would raise their hands and say, ‘Well, my Granny has a garden, or my Papaw has a garden.’” Over the years, those numbers started to drop.

Now, Williams’ students are growing food out of necessity. And more of them wish they knew how.

Education has become a major piece of the community gardens project in Hazard. Williams andCooper work with students at STARLand Academy, an afterschool program for children who are academically at-risk, to get hands on experience growing and cooking their own food. Caring for the community gardens has become a service project for the kids.

“One day we did ‘Random Acts of Weeding’ where we went downtown and weeded the beds. They’re really invested in the garden. They have fun out there,” said Williams.

“To see the pride that ensues from them being able to see how something can go from in the ground, into the kitchen, on to the plate, to see this is how food is actually created. That is a full-circle experience for them. That’s where change takes place is seeing: this is how we are meant to eat,” added Cooper.

Williams had always read that children who grow their own food are more willing to experiment with new flavors. It wasn’t until she witnessed it herself that she understood how powerful that relationship could be.

“Until you see some picky child put a leaf of spicy mustard in his or her mouth and chew it up, because they planted the seeds themselves – it’s very humbling and it’s really inspirational and it’s worth every single thing. It’s worth every blown off student paper that I don’t grade or night that I stay awake or all the money that I spend on my own to do a cooking class. It’s completely worth it if one of those kids grows up with a better attitude about food.”

What’s the next project for these women? Tackling food access issues.

“If you live downtown, or if you live anywhere, you can’t get food. Even if you can afford to buy fresh produce, you can’t get it here. My aim is to figure out a way to have gardens in every public housing project,” said Williams.

Cooper added, “I think the main issue is convenience food right now. If we could connect people more to their food source, and help them understand what’s going on with food processing, it could directly affect heart disease. It’s all about getting people back in the kitchen.”

To get involved with community gardens in Hazard, contact Jenny Williams at jenny.williams(at)kctcs.edu.