Group promotes Grow Palmer program with fare from downtown gardens

PALMER — Standing next to the sidewalk on Alaska Street Friday, Winona Benson makes eye contact with a passerby.

“How are ya? Want to try a salad?” she asks in about as friendly a voice as you can imagine. Indeed the passerby did, so Benson served it up in a shot glass-sized sample cup.

“We’re highlighting the vegetables that we got from the local Grow Palmer garden,” she said.

Grow Palmer started this summer and has already spread through most of downtown. Jan Newman, who spearheaded the effort, said volunteers planted edible crops in downtown gardens and flower barrels and invited the community to harvest them. She explained this to a woman drawn in by Benson’s presentation who asked if it was OK if she tidied up the garden.

“If you wanted to weed it would be great,” Newman said.

Benson isn’t with Grow Palmer, she’s with the Mat-Su Cooperative Extension Service in Palmer. She said Cooperative Extension is only minimally involved in the project.

“We’re involved in that Jan called us and we put it on our website,” she said.

Also, they encouraged the local 4-H Club and the Mat-Su Master Gardeners to help out.

Oh, and the classes. This is the second Friday Benson has been out demonstrating how to use the vegetables.

“It was not very fun last week,” she said. That’s because Palmer’s famous winds had made an appearance. “The kale was flying, I cut my finger because I was trying to hold everything down.”

But these kinds of classes are a service the cooperative extension is happy to provide. Benson is a nutrition educator. According to the cooperative extension’s website — uaf.edu/ces/districts/matsu — her program offers “in-home and group nutrition education classes for low-income families.”

“They can just call us (at 745-3677) and we can provide the classes,” she said. “The big thing is helping people stretch their food budget and not have to buy processed foods.”

As for the salads she made, all were judged to be delicious. They contained things as varied as apples and quinoa, nectarines and collared greens.

She also gave advice — massage the kale, for instance, to bring out the right flavor. Wait, seriously? Massage the kale?

“Yeah, I’m serious,” she said, then quipping, “and you want to talk sweet to it while you massage. ‘Oh, you worked so hard growing. You worked so hard to give us lunch.’”

Ingredients in her salads that can be found in the gardens include celery, parsley, kale, Swiss chard, summer squash, purple and orange cauliflower and something called a Romanesco.

That last item sparked some debate at the table. Is it a broccoli or a cauliflower? Or is it both? The consensus seemed to be it’s both. Either way, it was beautiful light green with spiraling spines. Benson joked that it should be served at Halloween or alien-themed parties.

Newman said that so far, the Grow Palmer program has been very popular. Three giant cabbages in the garden outside the Palmer Train Depot were harvested while they were still normal-sized, but the rest of the plants remain to fill in the garden.

An attendee of Benson’s presentation asked Newman if she had any kohlrabi and she said she did, at one point.

“In between each of these Brussels sprouts was a kohlrabi and they just got harvested like that!” she said, snapping her fingers.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or

andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.