Children's Garden in Fernwood

How lovely. Word comes from Fernwood of a new children's garden. Here's a message from Leah:

My name is Leah and I am writing with the hope that I can recruit some of you to come and join us this week in the very exciting creation of the Little Acorn Children's Garden. Over the past six months, I have been collaborating with a number of community groups to build a garden at the daycare where I work.  The available site for the garden is an old driveway which has meant a lot of creative thinking about how to transform that space into a vibrant oasis. This has been an amazing process which is finally coming to fruition as we now have gorgeous beds in place that are ready to be filled with soil and planted!!  Over the next week, we will definitely need some people power to move gravel and soil into the beds, and to get them planted!!  I would love some of your help to make this all come together.  If you can make it out, we will be in the garden on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday from 3:45-6pm.

Come and join us for a bed building and planting extravaganza!

Here is a loose schedule of what will be happening:

Tuesday - Lining beds with poly and filling beds with gravel and soil

Wednesday - Possibly more hauling of soil, Transplanting, Sowing

Thursday - Planting and Transplanting

Friday - Site Clean-up and Celebration!

What a wonderful idea. The address is 2629 Victor St. Email Leah if you can make it at Leah Seltzer leah.seltzer@gmail.com. I'll definitely be going to help out.

-Fiona Gilsenan

Children's Show on Allotments

Photo of Mr. Bloom and talking veg from www.bbc.co.uk.

Can you imagine a 26-part children's show about not just gardening, but about allotments? Well, if you could watch the BBC's children's channel CBeebies, you'd see one. Matthew Appleby writes about the new show.

The 26-part children's show features an allotment looked after Mr Bloom filled with talking vegetables: a shy cabbage, mischievous radishes, a comedy runner bean and a singing aubergine.
Garden writer Dawn Isaacs has given horticultural advice to the live action and puppet series.
Set in a colourful, fertile allotment run by the green-fingered Mr Bloom (Ben Faulks), Mr Bloom's Nursery, aims to show how young children can learn from the experience of nurturing plants and vegetables.
In each episode, a team of young helpers, or "tiddlers", come to the allotment to help Mr Bloom tend his plants and produce. But when they add leaves and clippings to his homemade "compostarium", a group of lively young vegetable puppets spring to life who the children play with, teach and care for.
Children will learn a variety of important lessons including the importance of drinking water when it is hot and sunny to understanding that growing takes time as well as simple vegetable-growing tips.

Perhaps the show will be available on dvd. Perhaps the CBC would like to do a show like this? Maybe First Lady Michelle Obama? What are the chances? You can read more about it at the BBC website.

-Fiona Gilsenan

Children Learn to Eat What they See

Contemplating the imminent demise of a heart-shaped, homegrown strawberry. Photo by Fiona Gilsenan.

George Ball, owner of Burpee seeds, has written a piece for the WSJ called 2011: The Year of the Vegetable. In it, he explains how children learn to love eating vegetables.

Liking vegetables is not a given: Every food other than breast milk is an acquired taste. But children can easily learn to enjoy eating their greens. It's simply a matter of education and familiarity—as in "family." Children will happily eat squash, artichoke or broccoli, to the delight of the parents who taught them to do so. As for fruits, children can gobble them up, but like vegetables, they must be at the ready, at least as available as all the junky alternatives.

The current childhood obesity crisis in the US (and close behind in Canada) is certainly due to the combination of poor eating habits and lack of physical activity. Ball talks about how to tackle the problem.

Yet no single institution is sufficient; fighting a problem of this sort requires a multifaceted effort. Churches could do much more to inspire families to grow vegetables. Public and private botanical and community gardening groups should augment efforts to lure neighbors into their educational demonstration gardens. Most families, whether in the city or suburbs, can plant at least a "starter garden"—involving pre-teen children in the planting, tending and harvesting.

We believe that every community garden should be a place of learning, for children and adults alike.

-Fiona Gilsenan