City Sprouts’ Kids Grow & Eat Their Veggies
This morning I had the wonderful opportunity to get a tour of the CitySprouts garden by the kids in their Summer Intern Program at King Open School in East Cambridge. CitySprouts is a nonprofit organization that works with the Cambridge, MA Public Schools to provide school gardens to elementary/middle schools and to integrate these gardens as learning resources into the curriculum. This is the only program in the country that runs from April through October and currently 12 public schools participate in the program. King Open School, our neighbor, was the first school to have this program!
Jane Hirschi, Executive Director of CitySprouts was our host. She gave us an overview of the program and then handed us over to the kids who gave each of us a personal tour of the garden. You can tell the kids are so proud of what they’ve grown and they should be! In their garden are beautiful carrots, cabbage, watermelon, string beans, strawberries, corn, eggplant, garlic, jalapenos, brussels sprouts, herbs and more. They’re even learning how to compost. Our smart little guide, Lessy, walked us through the process and explained how the end result gets put back into the soil. The kids are also learning to cook. Several times a week they cook with ingredients from their garden. Today, they served us a Vegetable Frittata and some lemony Hummus with their own fresh carrot sticks. Watch the video below to see Victor, Angel and Markus discuss the ingredients they used in their dishes and how they made them. These kids know their stuff! And it’s clear that growing their own produce and cooking with the ingredients has given them a level of pride and confidence they can take with them in anything they do in life.
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With the growing obesity problem in America amongst kids and their unfamiliarity with common vegetables like the potato (as seen in Jamie Oliver’s “Food Revolution”), programs like CitySprouts are so invaluable to teaching kids where their food comes from, how to cook and eat healthy and how to maintain a healthy lifestyle as adults.
Thanks to Jane, Francey Hart Slater, Education & Outreach Coordinator for CitySprouts, and Alice Guglemann, Garden Coordinator at King Open School, Fletcher Maynard Academy and Cambridgeport School for welcoming us into the King Open School garden.
Visit the CitySprouts website to learn more about this inspiring and very worthwhile program. And if you have an “in” with Michelle Obama, please be sure to encourage her to make programs like this available to all children in America. They deserve it.
