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When I was developing the poster for our new program, Families Growing Together, I took six-year-old Brianna down to our garden plot for some pictures of a full basket of vegetables.
We started on the carrots. I showed her the rows and told her to grab a bunch of leaves and yank them straight up out of the ground. She did, and her reaction almost brought tears to my eyes. “This is a carrot? Really, a carrot? Can I eat it?”
We went on to beets, yellow string beans, and cherry tomatoes. It was tough to convince her that a yellow string bean was really a string bean, but she ate one, and then a tomato, and then another string bean, and then another tomato.
We went to the garden pump, washed off a few carrots and ate them, walking the paths together.
This is exactly what I wanted to happen when I started working on Families Growing Together. Kids and parents growing vegetables, learning about how the soil nurtures our food, working in a garden together and enjoying all the bounty. |
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It isn’t only about vegetables, of course.
It’s families spending time together, getting to know each other.
It’s children mastering skills, feeling the joy of making something happen.
It’s parents seeing their children experience something amazing.
Families Growing Together is a year-long workshop that will teach 20 Putnam County families how to grow their own food. It’s funded by a wonderful grant from United Way of Westchester and Putnam.
Starting in October, we’ll have a class every month. We'll begin by learning how to prepare the soil for next year’s garden and follow with sessions on nutrition, cooking, kid-friendly science activities, and more.
Each family pays $40 for classes and its own 20’ x 20’ plot at the Tilly Foster Farm Community Garden in Brewster. Children will get kid-sized gardening tools, and each family gets a year-long gardening journal to record their experiences.
Master Gardener volunteers will be on hand to help teach and mentor families through the seasons. We’ll also show families who don’t have access to garden space how to grow vegetables in containers on a deck or a porch. And next September, we’ll have a big harvest party – enjoying the foods we’ve grown and the experiences we’ve shared.
What I hope will happen -- and I think there’s a pretty good chance -- is that this experience will lead these 20 families to eat more vegetables, enjoy gardening as exercise, feel healthier, and be able to make more good food choices.
I hope they’ll tell their friends and neighbors and start their own garden at home.
I was blessed to have my father teach me how to grow vegetables, and with a family tradition of eating whole fresh foods. We ate dinner together and gathered for day-long meals with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and friends. It’s sad for me to realize that there are so many people who don’t have this legacy and have little knowledge of how fabulous a really fresh tomato tastes.
I’m looking forward to sharing this and more, I’m looking froward to seeing more kids yank carrots out of the ground and eat them.
Putnam County families can register now. There’s room for only 20 families in Growing Together, but if hundreds of people are interested, we can offer how-to-grow-vegetables classes at libraries throughout the county.
If you’re interested in the year-long program, download a registration form from our website. Or, if you’re a Putnam resident with a more general interest in learning to grow vegetables,
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and we’ll talk about putting something together in your neighborhood.
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