Growing Knowledge: How Adelphi's “Keanu Leaves” Tower Garden Is Nourishing Students and Community

A grant-funded indoor garden is giving MS in Nutrition and Dietetics students hands-on experience while providing fresh produce to the community.

In Fall 2025, a new addition quietly took root in the offices of the Adelphi University Ruth S. Ammon College of Education and Health Sciences: a tall, leafy indoor garden known as a Tower Garden. Affectionately named "Keanu Leaves" after a campuswide naming contest, it offers fresh herbs and salad greens to students, faculty and staff who stop by to admire it. But Keanu Leaves is more than a conversation piece. It is a grant-funded initiative that serves as both a working classroom and a community resource.

Improving Access to Healthy Foods

The Tower Garden project was born out of a real community need. In 2022, Clinical Assistant Professor Rachel Taniey, PhD, director of the MS in Nutrition and Dietetics program in the Ruth S. Ammon College of Education and Health Sciences, surveyed users of Adelphi's on-campus food pantry, Panther Pantry, to better understand what students needed. "We learned that students want to see fresh produce and an extended variety of items," she said.

Armed with that insight, Dr. Taniey saw an opportunity to create a hands-on learning experience for graduate students. Through a New York State Department of Health Creating Healthy Schools and Communities (CHSC) grant, she received a Tower Garden to supply the fresh produce.

"The grant focuses on changing systems, policies and environment to improve access to affordable nourishing food, healthy food access and physical activity," said Karyn Kirschbaum, PhD, Adelphi adjunct professor of nutrition, who has coordinated the CHSC grant through Western Suffolk BOCES for nearly 20 years.

At the center of the project is a novel piece of food technology: an aeroponic growing system that allows you to cultivate fruits, leafy vegetables and herbs in a single vertical column. Seedlings are placed into pods along the outside of the tower, with their roots exposed at the center. A reservoir at the base holds water and a mineral blend, which a submersible pump continuously pushes to the top of the structure. From there, the nutrient-rich water cascades downward, misting the exposed roots before returning to the reservoir below. The result is a full harvest in as little as five to six weeks-and because the system grows indoors, it produces continuously throughout the year.

A Hands-On Learning Experience

Growing fresh produce for the Panther Pantry is only one component of the project-education is the other. Every semester, graduate students can fulfill the required 130 hours of supervised community nutrition fieldwork through the Tower Garden.

That's exactly the opportunity graduate students Alexis Provenz and Ellie Cohen were looking for. In addition to maintaining the garden, they assemble salad kits for Panther Pantry and organize educational events for the community.

The salad kits are a more recent innovation, born out of a simple realization. "We realized that maybe just bringing over bags of produce isn't the most appetizing way to encourage college students to eat vegetables," Dr. Taniey said. "So we put it all together in little to-go containers with a package of olive oil and a label that says 'Just add protein from the pantry.'"

The food demonstrations take that mission a step farther. On March 10, Provenz and Cohen led a station at Adelphi's Nutrition Fair, where they prepared dishes made entirely from Tower Garden and pantry ingredients. "We came up with two balanced and healthy recipes so students can replicate the recipes free of charge," Cohen said.

The experience has already proven to be a valuable complement to classroom learning. "We learn what truly goes into planning and organizing events behind the scenes, how to troubleshoot problems creatively, and how to collaborate with professionals and peers in a real-world setting," Provenz said. "It has given me a much deeper understanding of the work that goes into community nutrition programs and the impact they can have."

What's Next for "Keanu Leaves"

The Tower Garden project achieves two major goals of the MS in Nutrition and Dietetics program: increasing access to healthy food for Adelphi community members and preparing students for a career in nutrition.

"Our program is definitely rooted in community nutrition," Dr. Taniey said. "We are increasing access for our community members, and we are also increasing knowledge of community nutrition for our dietetics students and really preparing them for a career in community nutrition."

For Provenz, the project has shifted how she thinks about her field entirely. "This project has shown me that nutrition and dietetics is so much broader than simply 'eating healthy,'" she said. "Dietetics is deeply connected to community health, food access, education and sustainability."

And the project is still just getting started. Dr. Taniey recently submitted a research proposal for a case study of pantry users as they interact with the Tower Garden, food demonstrations and nutrition education materials. If approved, the study would bring a formal academic lens to an organic, hands-on initiative.

She also hopes to expand what the garden grows, adding more herbs and eventually vine plants like tomatoes. "We're excited to explore what we do next," Dr. Taniey says. "We'll be thinking of new recipes and ways to get students involved."