Grow This Story Archives - West Virginia Public Broadcasting

WVU Extension Offering Free Seeds, Statewide Competition

West Virginia University Extension is again sending free seeds to West Virginians who fill out a short online survey, but the program has a new focus in 2024.

The “Grow This: West Virginia Garden Challenge” is a project of the WVU Extension Family Nutrition Program that aims to teach West Virginians how to grow their own food.

Zack Harold, the program’s multimedia specialist, said in 2023 the program provided seeds to more than 60,000 state residents. This year, the program is launching the “Grow This Throwdown,” a statewide competition that aims to get West Virginians to move more and build community around food.

“There was already a community around ‘Grow This,’ it was just an online community,” Harold said. “It’s trying to take that community and turn it into a real world thing so that people know their neighbors and can be part of a real-world initiative and help people.”

The “Throwdown” will be a county competition with challenges set throughout the year, ranging from sharing vegetables with your neighbor, or setting up a seed exchange, to more involved challenges like creating a seed or tool library.

“But if you complete those challenges, you earn points,” Harold said. “At the end of the season, we’ll compile all those points, and the counties with the most points will win grant money for community improvement projects.”

The only two requirements to qualify for “Grow This” are to live in West Virginia and to fill out the program survey. Harold said replies to prior years’ surveys, particularly responses around wanting more access to affordable produce, inspired this year’s Throwdown and its community centered challenges.

“We wanted to find a way to take the energy surrounding this and the passion that people have for this and use that to try to tackle the food insecurity issue in some small way,” he said. “It’s not going to solve food insecurity in West Virginia, but it’ll help in some small way. And it might open people’s eyes to the needs around them that they might not have seen before.”

This year’s “Grow This” crops of carrots, peppers and kale will be familiar to participants from last year. Harold said although the seeds will be new varieties of the same vegetables, participants should be more familiar with their requirements now.

“The idea was that people kind of had a practice round last year, they learned about the unique challenges that are involved in growing those particular vegetables, so they can do it better this year and have a more successful garden in addition to competing in these challenges,” Harold said.

Harold says signups fill up fast, but even those who don’t get the free seeds from the survey can participate in Throwdown challenges.

Editor’s note: Zack Harold also reports for the Inside Appalachia Folkways Project.

World Record Attempt Brings Attention To Home Gardening, Food Access

History could be made Friday night at a baseball game in Morgantown — but it won’t have anything to do with the ball game.

The West Virginia University Extension Family Nutrition Program will attempt to break the record for the “world’s largest gardening lesson” when the West Virginia Black Bears play the Mahoning Valley Scrappers Friday night.

Zack Harold, the multimedia specialist with the WVU Extension Family Nutrition Program, said the attempt is a way to increase awareness of the Grow This: West Virginia Garden Challenge program that sends free seats to West Virginians.

“We thought, ‘What better way to get people excited and try to make history with home gardening?’” he said. “As much as it is about getting outside and enjoying the process of gardening, it’s also a food access issue for us.”

Harold said the main objective at the Family Nutrition Program is to teach West Virginia families how to feed their families better and healthier. One of the best ways to do that is to feed your family fresh fruits and vegetables.

“As we all know, that’s gonna be really hard to come across in West Virginia. We have a lot of areas of the state that are food deserts,” he said. “But if you learn to grow that food, it becomes not an issue of getting in the car and driving an hour to the nearest grocery store, it becomes just a matter of walking out to your backyard and picking it off the vine.”

The focus of the gardening lesson will be using recycled materials in the garden, which Harold said is meant to dispel the misconception that gardening requires a lot of upfront investment and cost.

“But really, if you got seeds, and you got some soil and water, you can use containers around your house to start seeds and grow them in,” he said. “You just got to get a little bit creative and West Virginians are great at that kind of creativity.”

The lesson will be taught by Sherry Weaver, winner of the recent Grow This Has Talent contest, and will aim to beat the current record, set in Turkmenistan in October 2022, where 569 people learned how to plant grape vines.
Editor’s note: Zack Harold also works as a Folkways reporter for the Inside Appalachia Folkways Project.

Coronavirus Sprouts A Budding Interest In Gardening, Local Food In W.Va.

To help decrease the spread of COVID-19, residents across the country, and here in West Virginia, are being asked to stay home, except to get the essentials such as food and medicine. Although the National Grocers Association assures there’s not a food shortage in the U.S., some store shelves are sparse.

As spring unfolds across the Mountain State, the pandemic is driving an influx of West Virginians back to the garden and to some of the state’s local farmers.

WVU Extension Service has seen firsthand the growing interest in planting and tending a garden. The WVU Extension Family Nutrition program runs an online gardening program called Grow This. It’s supported by the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program from the USDA Food and Nutrition Service.

Interested participants fill out an online survey and get free seeds for four crops. This year the crops are microgreens, peas, tomatoes and butternut squash. The program is open to anyone in West Virginia and, in recent years, a few hundred people have participated.

“This year, within three days of posting the first post for the year, we had over 1,000 people sign up, and we now have over 5,000,” said Kristin McCartney, a public health specialist with the Extension Service.

In the month since the program went live, more than 25,000 people have requested seeds. McCartney said staff is working from home to fulfill the requests, targeting those most in need.

McCartney’s first post included an image of a victory garden — the war-time morale-booster that encouraged people to plant food at home. In this time of COVID-19, she said the idea of growing more food seems to have resonated with many West Virignians.

“This is the time to pull together as a community and do what we can for ourselves and other people around us,” she said. “Part of that right now is just staying home, and another part is ensuring that our food supplies are secure and people can be fed.”

A screenshot of the victory garden post made by Grow This.

That’s a role some of the state’s farmers are taking on, according to Fritz Boettner, who heads the Turnrow Appalachian Food Collective located in southern West Virginia. The organization serves as a food hub and helps get produce from dozens of small growers into the hands of schools, restaurants and people across central Appalachia.

Some of the biggest markets for Turnrow growers included restaurants and schools, both of which are largely closed due to the coronavirus. That sent some farmers scrambling to find buyers for truckloads of salad greens, for example.

But during this pandemic, Boettner said a new market is flourishing — regular West Virignians seeking fresh produce. Turnrow has seen record sales from individuals placing orders through their online marketplace.

He thinks it highlights the vital role small farmers play in West Virginia. West Virginia is home to about 20,000 farms, and almost all of them are considered small. Ninety-three percent are family-owned, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“We need to think about food security and our food system in West Virginia and central Appalachia will help get us through this.” he said “And I think people are wanting to invest in that.”