Saturday, May 31, 2008

Kids day.....

The PING workshop today at Covenant Community Garden in Fuquay-Varina was all about the kids. They spent the morning harvesting, mulching beds, hauling coarse mulch for walkways, and preparing an old bed for a new crop. After a pot-luck lunch and an afternoon worship service, the younger kids went off for a reading of Stone Soup, and the older kids stayed with the adults who were taught about urban market gardening by young folks from SEEDS.
Chris Burtner, garden manager of Covenant Community Garden, and Slate Gray and Jeff Daniels.
Kane Martinez, Slate and Jeff harvesting carrots.
Michael Martinez - not at all camera shy!
Lisa Martinez, Jeff and Slate sorting out the bad from the good carrots.
Susan Greene (co-manager of Seagrove Community Garden) and Lisa working in the herb beds.Ricardo, Markyse and Anthony, youth from SEEDS in Durham, pointing out one of the features of the urban, market garden where they are employed. Here's a blurb about SEEDS from the Durham Farmer's Market web site.....
SEEDS Community Garden has been an oasis nestled between residential and industrial neighborhoods in Northeast Central Durham since 1994. The produce we bring to the Durham Farmers Market is raised by the Durham Inner-city Gardeners (DIG), a youth-led urban farming leadership development program that has been a part of SEEDS for the past 8 years. Our quarter-acre market garden is a former parking lot that is now a balanced ecosystem of plants and pollinators.
DIG empowers teens by teaching gardening, sound business practices, healthy food choices and food security values. The program emphasizes sustainable living and growing practices, ecological balance, and the natural recycling of organic materials for plant health and nourishment. DIG youth are paid a stipend to cultivate the fruits, vegetables, herbs, flowers and mushrooms that they sell at the Durham Farmer's Market. We also sell our produce to LocoPops and the Durham Food Co-op.

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