Community garden adds fresh produce to Hillcrest Transitional Housing's pantry

Residents and employees of Hillcrest Transitional Housing in Kansas City, Kansas, recently celebrated the community garden's first harvest of the season, knowing just how important it is to have fresh produce in the housing program's pantry.

Hillcrest Transitional Housing offers temporary rent-and-utility-free housing and case management to unhoused families and individuals.

The housing program allows its residents time to save money while they fulfill requirements, such as maintaining full employment and abstaining from drug and alcohol use.

Jinger Baker is a Hillcrest Transitional Housing alum. She discovered an overgrown, abandoned garden on the housing site's property in 2020.

“I asked them if I could play in the dirt and found the garden," Baker said.

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She had enough alone time during the pandemic to clean up the garden.

Even though she no longer lives at Hillcrest, she often spends time there upkeeping the community garden, which has been named "Jinger's Garden."

Baker was a newbie to gardening when she began in 2020, but she said she's learned so much since then.

“Watching the little things pop out of the ground was pretty exciting," she said. “I was running and grabbing everybody like, ‘Look!’ They’re like, ‘OK, Jinger.’”

Jack McCormick/KSHB

Pantries are often stocked with nonperishable items, but Jinger's Garden fills a gap by providing nutritious, fresh produce.

Jack McCormick/KSHB

“It just felt great to just have that first moment where we got to put them in the fridges and in the pantries and just know it’s going to our families," said Kyleigh Milford, Hillcrest Transitional Housing's operations manager.

Both Milford and Baker said the garden is therapeutic. Oftentimes, Hillcrest residents join in on the activity, too.

“Well, they like to come together and sometimes help with the pulling of the weeds," Baker said. "It got them all chit-chatting and communicating, whereas normally, they’d probably just stay in their own dwellings and just go to work and come home and do their own thing."

There's such an abundance of produce from Jinger's Garden that Baker gives away free produce from her own home. She posts fliers around her neighborhood to notify neighbors.

“They’re always coming down and asking, 'Are you going to have those tomatoes again?'” Baker said.

Jack McCormick/KSHB

But it's not just Milford, Baker and residents manning the garden, Baker's dog, Winchester, roams the garden without a leash while Baker weeds away.

“Whenever it gets late in the evening, he is on critter patrol, ‘cause if a raccoon sneaks out and sneaks up on me, I told him he’s fired," Baker said.

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