Blog post by ACG Intern Lydia Pulsinelli
On a beautiful Saturday in October, I laid out my table for the Harvest Festival with plants freshly harvested from the Kitchen Garden a few feet away. Throughout the day, I cut into squashes and melons to unveil the seeds within to visitors. People rubbed and smelled the leaves of Apazote while I kept a tally of whether people did or didn’t like the pungent aromas (most were in favor!). At one point, my fellow intern Fernando ran off to the microwave so we could test if our Strawberry Popcorn really would pop, returning with a cupful of pale, fluffy pieces of popped popcorn for us all to marvel over. It was a day full of spontaneous, engaging, and joyous learning opportunities.
Over the summer, I was the Kitchen Garden intern at the Allen Centennial Garden, and I got to continue that work into the fall while completing my capstone project for my certificate in Food Systems. My central project for the fall was developing this programming for the Garden’s annual Harvest Festival. It was a delight to share about the crops I’d been growing and to help people learn about the plants themselves as well as the cultures they connect to. My time working in the Kitchen Garden made me extra appreciative of the harvest season this year – it was truly a rewarding conclusion to see plants that we placed in the ground as tiny plugs grow into full, thriving plants offering up a bounty of fruits, vegetables, and seeds.
This year, our Kitchen Garden contained a Latine Garden, a Chinese Garden, and an Indigenous Garden. Each segment of the Kitchen Garden is planned in conjunction with partners from the community who help us to select what plants to grow and how best to represent the cultures whose plants we steward. Our community partners have been a great resource all year, and they continued to offer guidance as I developed my learning objectives of what I wanted to share with visitors to the Festival.
Claudia I. Calderón, teaching faculty in the department of Plant and Agroecosystem Sciences, was our community partner for the Latine Garden this year. One of the key themes she wanted to emphasize was the concept of “food as medicine” – that while we consider our garden to have both culinary and medicinal plants, many plants in reality serve as both at the same time. Apazote, for example, is an herb commonly included in soups and sauces in Latin America, and has strong antiparasitic properties. In our discussions, Claudia tied the medicinal properties of these plants to their domestication process, where the bitter, medicinally beneficial compounds had not been selected against, and so still remained in the plant.
At my table, I had leaves of Apazote and several other pungent, medicinal herbs for visitors to smell. On my poster, I highlighted the culinary uses and medicinal properties of each plant. I explained to visitors how the strong, bitter smells of the plants were connected to their medicinal benefits, and represented a bit of the wild nature of these herbs. I had a great conversation with one visitor where he related some of the plants on my table to things his wife was growing in her garden, and we had an in-depth conversation about the processes of plant domestication and some of the “lost crops” of the ancient Americas.
Another one of our community partners was the Native American Center for Health Professions, or NACHP, who were partners on our Native American Garden. One of the key stories I highlighted on my poster was about seed saving and its importance to both plant communities and human communities. Many of the seeds in the garden had been donated by a family who attended the Menominee Seed Exchange, and our Strawberry Popcorn had been donated by an Oneida graduate student. This integrated well into the Harvest Festival, as my table was right next to Festival’s own seed exchange, allowing visitors to connect ideas from my table into something they could tangibly take home themselves. I wanted to bridge the gap between a plant in a garden and a seed in a seed pouch, to show how seeds grow and develop as part of a plant’s life cycle. I used some seeds we are generally familiar with to demonstrate – like rice, still on the stalk and in its husk, and sesame seeds, crammed by the dozens into pods rather than atop a burger.
Another demonstration of seed and fruit development was my Bitter Melon fruits, which ended up being by far the most popular demonstration on my table. By a stroke of luck, the Chinese Garden had a fully-ripe Bitter Melon. When the fruit is mature, it turns bright yellow, and the seeds within become surrounded by red, fleshy arils. Unlike the famously bitter exterior of the fruit, these hidden gems are sweet! As the fruit is generally harvested at the green stage before it is ripe, even people familiar with Bitter Melon rarely see it at this mature stage. It was a great demonstration that went along well with my other demonstrations about mature fruits and seed saving, as I wanted to demonstrate that there is often a difference between plants in the stage we consume them vs. their actual maturity where seeds are collected from them.
By the end of the day, my table was littered with far more cross-sections of assorted squashes than I had started with, sesame and amaranth seeds had escaped far beyond the edges of my table, and my fingers were stained red from squeezing Bitter Melon arils to show their squishy texture. Everyone who visited had been eager to learn, and I hope everyone came away with a little more knowledge about all the different plants that can play a role in a multicultural Kitchen Garden.