By Kimberly Paulk, SHARECharlotte.com, a free, easy and local website that makes it easy to learn about and engage with our local nonprofits
Gardening has a magical quality when you are a child. – Barbara Damrosch
“But where’s the carrot?” This is the question a little neighborhood boy asked me one day as I was showing him our backyard garden. The carrots, it turned out, were right in front of him. But because he’d never seen a carrot outside a grocery store (or “in the wild” as I described it to him, to jazz it up a bit), he had no idea the green tufts shooting out of the earth at his feet were attached to something edible.
My backyard garden is gone, set aside for other priorities that life brought my way. But even if we don’t have the time or space for a personal garden, Green Teacher Network is working to make sure kids experience gardens, and where their food comes from, through school gardens.
Right now they connect more than 800 teachers and informal educators to a schoolyard gardening network through professional development workshops, creation of a specialized curriculum, and more. They support 145 local schools engaged in school gardening, and coming up in 2015 they have exciting plans to develop a market for schools growing “crops” to sell to local Farm to Table restaurants.
Meanwhile, the gardens need to be tended! If you’d like to dig in the earth this summer, think about the volunteer opportunity featured below. As always, if you’d like more info just visit SHARE Charlotte.
Schoolyard Garden Support Network – Garden Volunteers coordinate the goals of the summer gardens with the lead teacher and Green Teacher Network. They check the gardens two or three times a week, harvest, weed and water.
