Wellington GC-Elks Youth Vegetable Garden Project
Here are a couple of photos from the first meeting with the 4th and 5th graders at the Wynnebrook Elementary After Care Program.
Elks Lodge #1352 and the Wellington Garden club are partnering in a program to involve elementary school youth at Wynnebrook and Washington Elementary schools in the planting, maintaining and consuming vegetables that they grow themselves. The first session involved tasting a variety of heirloom organic tomatoes provided by Whole Foods Wellington and planting various types of tomato seeds. The children learned about determinate versus indeterminate tomatoes, how hours of sunlight effect the time of harvest and how certain varieties produce different size fruits, some earlier than others.
Future meetings will involve a nutrition lesson and easy to use recipes for the children to take home and use when they begin harvesting, learning the ingredients that go into pizzas that they will grow themselves and then sampling the types of vegetables and pizza. In a few weeks they will walk to the large garden plot developed at the Elks and transplant the tomatoes they have grown and plant seeds of vegetables such as spinach, leaf lettuce, bush and pole beans, peas, collard greens, cucumbers, radishes, carrots, eggplant and herbs such as basil and oregano.
Pictured are Elks member Bill Hopkins, Wellington Garden Club members Kathy Hernicz and Barbara Hadsell and Tim Hadsell, who is both an Elk and a Wellington Garden Club member. Uma Bhatti, Wellington Garden club, was the photographer.