Plant Medicine Education at Kelly Street Garden

When we first came to Kelly Street Garden, our primary instinct was to center the garden as a direct path to dealing with one’s own need to reestablish balance. A hub for healing and education. The first step toward this novel goal was to bring sensible approaches to nutrition that are centered in why we need to grow our own food. Our community chefs demonstrate how to cook what we have in the garden in a healthful way. The Healing Herb Garden has been a strong alliance to our nutritional education. We currently grow over 80 unique varieties of medicinal plants and culinary herbs. This is the natural evolution for our programming to move toward more natural medicine education. We wish to offer this to the community at no cost as a way to invite people to learn how to take control of their own health and healing with full access to our currently abundant apothecary.

We have developed an extensive resume of programming around medicine, culture and creativity. In 2022, KSG hosted over 50 workshops. With our own Plant Medicine Program we can dig deeper into the Kelly Street Community making medicinal medicine accessible to those who might otherwise not be able to afford it. 

With your support, you will be helping to make a huge impact on our local communities.

The program will be spearheaded by trained Herbalists some whom are alumnus of “The Art and Practice of Spiritual Herbalism” program at Sacred Vibes Apothecary. 

In collaboration with the KSG gardeners, we will craft a free-to-the-public program. The proposed curriculum for the program will be 4 months. Students will be led through several stages of becoming acquainted with a variety of herbs and begin to know what their effect on our well being are.

By having the program garden based, apprentices will not only learn good growing practices, but they will learn to cultivate medicinal plants themselves as well as identifying what they actually look like.

During the course of the program participants will learn to make tinctures, honey infusions, ointments, salves and many other things that deal with natural first aid.

The ultimate goal is to have an integrated nutrition and herbal medicine curriculum that could be used as a model to expand to other locations in developing good community engagement around health, healing and community engagement across racial, gender and intergenerational lines.

Our work at Kelly Street Garden has a proven record of impact. We have found that through giving participants a space to grow themselves in relation to the garden that this has a wide ranging positive affect on our lives and the communities we live in. Many of our interns, volunteers and gardeners have expanded into other projects that have blossomed into careers. The Herbal Medicine Training Program is the natural next step in this evolution. 

“A year after the pandemic started, I was part of a group of studying herbalists who volunteered at Kelly Street Garden (KSG). I can't recall what I was expecting, but I can confirm that it was not Kelly Street. In fact, KSG defies all logic for the surrounding community. When you walk down the steps to Kelly Street Garden, you enter a portal.  This is where the fairies are - magic! It is lush and abundant and an immediate mood booster.  It is also work. KSG offers some of the best and most delicious produce I've ever tasted, but in exchange requires heart and sweat. I've not only tilled the soil, planted seeds, and harvested at Kelly Street, I've done yoga, danced, and made art.  Kelly Street made me a better human, thinker, and gardener. In fact, in my own community garden plot near my home, I am growing beautiful produce, herbs, and even some roses. My hands are steadier and abundant because they were also part of a greater community project that fed more than just myself.”  —Sara Stroman, Project leader, Herbalist

A focused and strategic engagement with urban agriculture. —Peter Stand, Stand Development & Consulting

The garden is not just about growing food. It is a way of investing in people and investing in this city”  —Renee Keitt, KSG Garden Manager