08 Jun Your Friendly Neighborhood School Garden
Tucked away in the backyard of Comegys Elementary School is a budding urban garden full of ripe fruits and vegetables. Walking past the entrance of the school, you would have never guessed that a variety of healthy deliciousness is growing in their own playground! Here, the kids have the unmatched opportunity to grow their own food that is used by Comegys for the Cooking Crew and Fruit Stand afterschool programs. Both programs are food education activities implemented by the Urban Nutrition Initiative that the kids participate in to learn about the benefits of growing, cooking, and eating your own healthy food creations! In doing so, the kids also help increase the supply of fresh produce and snacks for themselves and their friends! So cool, right? Both are wonderful programs that Rebel Venture mentors get to participate in and I was beyond excited to begin this new journey last week.
Growing up in urban Los Angeles, I never had this amazing experience in my own elementary school, so I felt blessed to be able to plant with the kids last Friday afternoon on a sunny West Philadelphia summer day.
This is the entrance of the garden where Comegys kids plant seeds and grow healthy food!
I was very impressed by the number of fruits and vegetables that were already planted and growing in the garden! Look at this beautiful greenery below! How does your garden grow?
I stumbled upon a variety of different foods, but my favorite plant that I encountered happens to be my favorite vegetable: the carrot! I was excited to see this growing right in front of my eyes! I so badly wanted to harvest it right then and there, but I held myself back to help with the planting.
The kids were so excited to plant the seeds. We planted dill, carrot, and spinach seeds all across the soil. They would cover the seeds and then shout at them encouraging words like “You are going to grow up and help us be healthier!” They really did care about their gardening! Watching them cultivate their own food was so inspiring that it convinced me to grow my own garden once I get home. You don’t have to be in a rural environment to grow your own food- you can truly do it anywhere!
There is something really enriching about seeing these urban kids excited by getting their hands dirty and experiencing the tasty, healthy rewards of their own handiwork. So many of the kids I have encountered in these schools ate mostly cheap, processed snacks bought at corner stores and had never seen a fruit or vegetable growing. I bet some genuinely believed that fruits, like apples, were manufactured in factories because that is how the food industry can be sometimes! Teaching them how to garden was also imparting to them an important lifeskill that would serve them into adulthood. I really hope more schools can adopt these programs by seeing how it affects their students. I can’t wait to continue helping out with the garden this summer and I hope I can harvest those carrots at some point. Thanks for this amazing opportunity, RV.
By Emily Irani
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