Children's Garden Educates, Empowers R.I. Kids

By DAVE FISHER/ecoRI News staff

Dana Wolfson guides children from Bright Horizons through the farm and teaches them how to make pickles. (Dave Fisher/ecoRI News staff)PROVIDENCE — Too many kids today think fruits and vegetables originate at the supermarket. Southside Community Land Trust has been heading that notion off at the pass with its Children's Garden.

Now in its 20^th year, the program brings 200 elementary and middle school students to City Farm for an engaging, hands-on, summer-long gardening and education enrichment.

Participants learn how to grow food, learn about the importance of healthy soil, what compost is and how to make it, and why certain garden bugs are good for plants. The kids harvest salad greens, fruits and vegetables, and make healthy snacks with the foods they’ve grown.

Southside Community Land Trust partners with youth summer programs at community centers and schools for the Children’s Garden. Each partner brings groups of 15-30 kids weekly to the West Side farm to experience its sights, sounds and smells.

The smells on the farm are quite intoxicating. Following the youngsters on their touching, smelling and harvesting tour, one’s sinuses are nearly overwhelmed by the wafting fragrance of dill, oregano, mint and good compost.

A group of 4- and 5-year-olds from the corporate daycare company Bright Horizons were seemingly vibrating with enthusiasm while they explored the farm, picking cucumbers, tomatoes and dill for the pickles they were about to make.

It was rather endearing to hear them mimic the cock-a-doodle-doo of the rooster — after it was explained to them that keeping roosters in the city was against the law. It plucked the heartstrings to hear the kids fighting over whose turn it was to whisk the brine for the pickles, rather than whose turn it was to play a video game. After the brine was prepared, the kids took their handmade notebooks to draw and write about what they had seen on the farm.

The program features lessons about nutrition, the environment and gardening. Children’s Garden culminates with an end-of-summer party, City Fest, at City Farm. City Fest gives the youngsters the chance to celebrate the end of the growing season and share the fruits of their labor with parents, siblings and neighbors.

Any psychologist will tell you that most people’s behaviors are ingrained in them by the age of 5. That makes it all the more important to connect children with the food system at a young age. Southside Community Land Trust gets that, and the Children's Garden program has helped hundreds of Rhode Island children connect the dots between farms and dinner tables.