The Shawnee Indian Mission is a valuable community resource. It’s a gathering place, a showcase, a landmark and a learning center. The many organizations that serve as Mission partners enable the Mission to offer to attract and engage visitors of all ages. This column will focus on one such partner.
Anyone who’s ever put seed to soil knows gardens don’t just happen. Weeds happen, but gardens take planting, tending, patience and an abiding spirit of optimism. At the Shawnee Indian Mission, we’re lucky to have, as our partners, a volunteer team with the just the right talent and the temperament: the Johnson County Master Gardeners.
Sponsored by Kansas State Research and Extension Office, the Master Gardeners program enlists committed gardeners who are willing to share their time, their skills, their love of gardening and their considerable training.
Since 2003, the Master Gardeners have devoted thousands of hours to creating and maintaining five different gardens on the Mission campus: a vegetable garden, a large rain garden and monarch butterfly waystation, a native plant bed, an herb garden and a Junior Master Garden (operated in partnership with St. Agnes Church).
On every Wednesday morning, from March through October, a dedicated team of Master Gardeners tends the gardens — tilling, planting weeding, watering, staking, pruning and picking. The plants are carefully chosen to recreate the original prairie gardens that might have dotted the Mission landscape a century ago.
The vegetable garden is not only beautiful and educational, it’s bountiful. From early summer through late fall, the gardeners fill crate after crate of fresh produce bound for local food banks. To date, the Mission has contributed over 10,000 pounds of healthy fruits and vegetables to needy families in our community.
In addition to their time in the gardens, the Master Gardeners team has become an active partner in our educational programming at the mission. Over the years, the Master Gardeners have met with thousands of local students to teach them about the value of native plants, the sources of food on their tables and the importance of the plants in their daily lives.
Jennifer Laughlin, Site Director of the Mission, has high praise for the gardeners. “I personally see them work in the cold, the rain and the summer heat,” she says, “dragging yard bags of overgrowth and hauling bins of compost and baskets of produce. This site is incredibly lucky to have the MGs as a part of our community. They’ve donated nearly 8,500 volunteer hours with (hopefully) no plans to stop.”
