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moominmamma_gw

Children's Community Garden Club

moominmamma
19 years ago

I posted a couple of times last year about my plans to start a children's garden club in my very small (pop. I've had a small vegetable garden at home for years but besides planting a few seeds and eating the harvest, my four (homeschooled) kids seemed to take little interest in the endeavour. I had this theory that I might be able to get them to take a more active role in gardening if the work was gently structured and social. I'd heard about a vibrant children's gardening club in the US that some friends of ours were involved in. My wheels started turning.

I wanted a physical "community garden" site for the kids to use as a home base. I looked at three different sites but one of them just fell into place perfectly. It had been earmarked for a possible community greenhouse or green space and is ideally situated on the lakefront in a sheltered, south-facing bay, with beach access and a million-dollar view. We got it, for free. We also scored a $500 start-up grant from the local Recreation Commission. Then a family of other homeschoolers moved to town, with parents full of organic gardening expertise and enthusiasm for the project. Talk about achieving momentum!

We've now had 5 meetings. The club, thus far, consists of 7 families, 14 kids aged 6-12, with a few younger siblings and parents involved at each meeting. We made it clear that since the two leaders have toddlers, we were not providing a "drop your kids off and we'll entertain them" service, that this was a club for "children and families" and parent participation was expected. We charge $1 per family per meeting. We've come up with a triple mandate of organic gardening, environmental education and stewardship, and community service. There's been lots of collaborative discussion about the club's plans, on balancing communal responsibility with independence and creativity, about how to organize the garden and what projects to work at first.

We've made mosaic-tile pavers to grace the entry-way, hand-bound nature journals, explored the garden site and its surrounding area by doing scavenger hunts, done experiments with seeds, grown salad sprouts, made birdseed ornaments, tapped birch trees for sap, analyzed our soil chemically and physically, explored principles of erosion, picked litter at a community picnic site, begun to record weather data, to build a weather station, to build a guage for measuring lakewater levels, started seedlings in flats. We were even able to visit a half-blind bald eagle today that had been rescued flightless and starving off the beach a couple of days ago.

In the weeks to come we'll be building a bat house, birdhouses, a scarecrow, a compost bin, a wormery, a noticeboard, sinking fenceposts and marking out the beds and paths.

The community has been tremendously supportive, considering how small and new and under-the-radar the group is as of yet. A number of local gardeners are growing extra seedlings for us in their greenhouses, we've received donations of tools and supplies, people are offering to come and help at work-bees to develop the site or to visit the group as guest speakers or host a field trip.

We called the club GRUBS (awkwardly anagrammed out as "Garden Rangers United in Bio-Sustainability), to match it up with the longstanding local SLUGS ("Slocan Lake Garden Society"), the adult-oriented group that maintains a stunning nearby community reflection garden. The GRUBS families also volunteer for many of the SLUGS work-bees, which is I think giving the mostly-seniors group a much appreciated injection of lively energy, and the kids the chance to work alongside elderly folk they wouldn't otherwise cross paths with.

The biggest surprise to me is how enthusiastic my own kids are. They generally balk at anything I initiate, or anything that they sense I believe to be particularly important. I expected them to warm up to GRUBS very gradually and begrudgingly. But it's not like that at all! They are loving it, brimming over with enthusiasm. "Being together mostly outdoors with other kids doing real work on something worthy and largely child-directed" seems to be a formula they can't resist.

I can't speak highly enough of our experience with this so far.

Miranda

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