City staff in Kingston are using the city's own greenhouse to grow vegetables for a local charity to help address food insecurity in the region.
Karen Schinners has worked at the City of Kingston’s Rodden Park Greenhouse for more than 20 years and says that she and her fellow horticulturalist Dustin Thompson saw the issue of food insecurity growing throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. “Many people are hurting, for fresh food especially,” she explains in an interview with CTV News Ottawa. “I was aware that we could give something back.”
The greenhouse traditionally grows the spring and summer blooms that are placed in parks and the downtown core to beautify the city. Before the pandemic, it would be open to tourists to come and see the growing plants, but COVID-19 restrictions meant that wasn’t possible, freeing up extra space in the building.
Schinners and her fellow staff members approached the city to allow the group to grow lettuce for charity.
“It’s a crop that we can easily produce over winter, it doesn’t require a lot of excess time, and it was something very easy for us to do that would help people,” she says.
Read the complete article at www.ottowa.ctvnews.ca.