Kansas City Community Gardens

We stopped off at Kansas City Community Gardens this afternoon to get fertilizer, seeds and seedlings for the fall garden.

I'd wanted to get Corinna by there ever since last year when I'd discovered it. Great prices on everything they sell, plus great advice for what works in the area.

What I'd missed before, though, is the demonstration plots. I had seen the rental plots where people who presumably don't have space at home to garden can grow vegetables in nice raised beds. But beyond that, there's pretty near everything you can gros in Kansas City edible or otherwise. You go through a gourd and hyacinth bridge and you're out in an area that has 9 foot tall corn (Reid's Yellow Dent'), towering sunflowers, a 'beanstalk' with hyacinths growing probably twenty feet up, hardy figs (you can grow figs in Kansas City! Who knew?), all manner of vegetable and fruit.

Corinna and I, our gardening technique is to plant something, and if it dies, we plant it again and then, if by the third year it hasn't succeeded, we plant it and then do some homework on how we ought to have done it. How much more sense does it make to just get free advice from master gardeners?

Lots of ideas about what to grow for next year, including figs, maybe some of that giant corn, and something called 'Malabar Spinach' which technically isn't spinach at all, but tastes just like it, and is a heat tolerant climber. So you can actually have spinach in August and September. Dude, I'm all about that.

I'm not sure I want to grow prickly pears, but did you know that's native to Missouri?