The AmeriCorps team began this garden with the intent to donate some food, and to cook with some vegetables to educate the community about healthy eating. However, there were way too many vegetables for us to eat, and too few vegetables to donate in a manner that seemed fair. As we contemplated the fate of our vegetables, Donna- the woman who began the community garden program- approached us with a solution.
St. Matt's Head Start is a preschool in Ossining that has an amazing program. The young children had been visiting the garden and picking vegetables, in order to learn about healthful eating. Other gardeners had been contributing to this amazing program by giving permission for the children to pick from their plots. We were very excited to learn about this, and to let the kids pick from our bounty of tomatoes and cucumbers.
Donna told me about how excited the children are to be in the garden. She described how one child screamed in delight when he thought he saw an apple, even though it was really a green tomato!
As a child, you are concerned about the taste of food and the happy meals that come with it, you don't think about the nutrition. It is nice that the children at St. Matt's are viewing eating healthy vegetables as a fun activity, and hopefully this will be a notion they carry throughout their lives.
I am proud that we are helping to shape these young children's positive views of vegetables.
Tamisha (age 3) and Franklin (age 5) from
St. Matt's, posing with bok choy just picked
from the Ossining Community Garden.
Photo credit to Donna Sharrett.
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