Mennonite
Central
Committee

Gardening heals hurting hearts and helps make ends meet

Cathi Conti Sinsabaugh
June 5, 2006

A brilliant, deep blue sky frames a bright sun on a warm, breezy spring day in southeastern Kentucky. Outside the Caney Creek Rehabilitation Center in Pippa Passes, Ky., several residents chat as they work alongside their rehabilitation assistants in the greenhouse and in the vegetable gardens.

Caney Creek is a nonprofit residential facility for individuals learning to live with chronic mental illness. A staff of rehabilitation assistants helps residents manage their mental illness and acquire the life skills necessary for independent living.

Gardening plays a vital role in helping Caney Creek residents improve their mental health. So does MCC.

Caney Creek is just one of many social service agencies across southeastern Kentucky that receives vegetable seeds every spring from MCC. The seeds not only promote healing, as for Caney Creek residents, but also stave off hunger for families who are struggling to make ends meet. Food pantries and community agencies in Kentucky and West Virginia include them in food packages.

At Caney Creek, the residents plant the seeds, then care for and harvest the vegetables, which are served in the dining hall.

Willard Fleming, a rehabilitation assistant at the center, is a lifelong gardener and a believer in the therapeutic value of gardening. Growing things just comes natural, like breathing, Fleming said. Our residents here just love it, and its great therapy.

To Fleming, working in the garden together with the residents is a great way to open up communication and get residents talking about their problems in a safe, casual and nonthreatening environment.

We work out here together and talk about things of life, just like I did with my dad working on the farm, growing up, Fleming explained. The time goes quickly when you're doing something you enjoy.

Growing vegetables also help keep food costs down at Caney Creek, and provides the residents with deliciously fresh, healthy vegetables that they nurtured and grew themselves.

They sure enjoy eating the fruits of their labor, Fleming grinned.

Spreading seeds across the region

The seeds of more than 20 different kinds of vegetables are donated to MCC from Rupp Seeds, a Mennonite-owned commercial seed distributor in Wauseon, Ohio. The owners, Roger and Peggy Rupp, attend Tedrow (Ohio) Mennonite Church, and have been donating their excess seed inventory to MCC for 12 years.

"Roger and I came to Kentucky last year personally to deliver a trailer-load full of seeds," said Peggy Rupp. "We get a lot of satisfaction doing this."

Rupp delivers the seeds to MCC in Appalachia in 50-pound bulk bags. This year, MCC received more than 60 large 50-pound bags of green bean seeds and 60 bags of corn seeds alone. A sack of tiny carrot seeds contains more than 500,000 seeds. Other bags are filled with seeds for beets, radishes, lettuce and pumpkins.

These are way too many seeds for MCC to distribute directly to people, so we have other partner agencies that help us distribute the seeds to those who need them, said Duane Beachy, MCC Great Lakes Appalachian program coordinator. We work with at least a dozen different social service agencies who then distribute the seeds to their clients.

Vegetables for food boxes

At the Letcher County Food Bank in Whitesburg, Ky., volunteers divide the seeds and place them into envelopes and small plastic bags to be given out to people who come in for boxes of food.

Eolia Christian Community Outreach, Inc. (ECCO), an MCC partner that provides food, clothing and emergency services to this impoverished area of Appalachia, also distributed vegetable seeds with their monthly food distribution program.

We have folks trying to survive on drawing a government check of $400 or $500 a month, said ECCO director Brenda Gross. Planting a home garden with these seeds makes a huge difference in their food budgets.

Dorothy Jones from Partridge, Ky., agrees.

"My husband is disabled with a heart condition, Jones said. Sometimes we run short on something, so having a garden really helps. For us, having a garden helps us survive. Growing those vegetables means less that we have to buy at the store. Then we can use that money for something else."

Back at Caney Creek Rehabilitation Center, Fleming smiled as he gazed on the neat rows of peas, winding their way up his homemade trellises.

I was raised on a farm, and we thought wed starve to death if we didn't raise beans and potatoes and corn. And I'm still planting. Its so natural to us.

 

Cathi Conti Sinsabaugh is communications coordinator for MCC Great Lakes.