'Farm to table' at St. Mary's Health Care Center

By Tanya Connor | The Catholic Free Press

WORCESTER – Youth and elders, college and community, joined forces to produce a bountiful harvest at St. Mary Health Care Center this year.
Holy Cross students arranged for wheelchair-height garden boxes to be placed in the center’s courtyard last spring. With help from St. Mary’s activities team, residents planted and maintained vegetables, herbs and flowers.
The residents “love the farm to table,” Sandy Geller, St. Mary’s director of activities, said. “They feel like they farmed it, and then the kitchen uses it for the meals. … They used basil in American chop suey. The dill has been a garnish on the fish.”
The garden idea sprouted from visits Holy Cross senior William McAvoy has been making to St. Mary’s since his freshman year. And those visits grew out of something he’s been involved in since that time: The Donelan Office of Community-Based Learning at Holy Cross.
That office helps students make connections between their courses and community sites, benefitting both parties, according to the website www.holycross.edu. This is done through an endowment established by Joseph P. Donelan II, a 1972 graduate. The office, part of the J.D. Power Center for Liberal Arts in the World at the college, “helps students identify and pursue experiential learning opportunities.”
One of Mr. McAvoy’s community-based learning classes was “Identity, Diversity and Community: Exploring Difference.” For it, he started visiting a St. Mary’s resident called Commander Cliff, who, like him, was in ROTC, but at Yale.
After the class ended, Mr. McAvoy kept visiting. Some time after Commander Cliff died, Ms. Geller matched him with Sister Ellen Henighan, a Sister of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.
“She was always interested in gardening,” said Mr. McAvoy, a biology major with a pre-med concentration. “She had four master’s degrees in biology and education” and said her love of gardening got her interested in biology.
He said he brought his girlfriend, Megan Treanor, a fellow Holy Cross student, to see Sister Ellen, and his girlfriend suggested making a garden at St. Mary’s.
St. Mary’s didn’t have a garden, just some potted plants in a greenhouse room, Ms. Geller said.
The two students applied for a grant from their college’s Marshall Memorial Fund for this community-based learning project.
Ms. Geller said Sister Ellen died last January, before they received the grant.
She then matched Mr. McAvoy with Vicky Kirby, a current resident.  
During a recent interview about the garden, Mr. McAvoy and Ms. Kirby talked about their relationship.  
“You’ve told me about gardening,” Mr. McAvoy told her. “That’s going to (stay) with me. You’ve taught me a lot.”
“You are the son/grandson I never had,” Ms. Kirby responded.
She expressed delight at helping with the garden too.
With the grant of $900-plus, Mr. McAvoy bought three wheelchair-height garden boxes and 20 bags of potting soil – so much that the car they used to transport it to St. Mary’s was sagging – he said. He also bought gardening gloves for the residents, Ms. Geller said.
Mr. McAvoy got donations of seedlings through the Regional Environmental Council’s community gardens network – Urban Garden Resources of Worcester (UGrow). He said his former sociology professor, Stephanie Crist, is on the board of directors and some of the seedlings are grown at Holy Cross.    
Ms. Geller said UGrow gave them pepper, tomato, collard and basil seedlings, and St. Mary’s activity fund  paid for other herbs and flowers.
By the time they planted them, Mr. McAvoy had finished school for the year. So St. Mary’s sent him and his professors photos of the garden and, later, the crops. They even included a cut-out of Pope Francis in photos giving a thumbs-up, Ms. Geller said.
Mr. McAvoy said it was great to see the photos over the summer, especially since he was engaged in difficult, active-duty training with the United States Naval Academy aboard a ship.
The garden helped St. Mary’s too. Ms. Geller said
residents had wished to enhance the facility’s food service.
St. Mary’s presented that issue to Holy Cross’ community-based learning office that brings together students and non-profit organizations. Students do research about the issues and offer suggestions for dealing with them.
Food from the garden helped St. Mary’s new food service director improve the food’s look and taste, Ms. Geller said. Smell was important too.
“I witnessed a lot of residents” bringing herbs from the garden over to other residents during summer activities in courtyard, she said. “It was a sensory event.” Residents smelled the herbs and talked about what they used to cook with plants like these.
Ms. Geller said the garden is “therapeutic.”
“When the residents come outside … they become at ease,” she said. “They’re content, just like you and I would be in our home garden.”