Mary Nash Beaupre Greenhouse & Campbell’s True Value Community Gardens
At the Alfond Youth & Community Center, they believe every child deserves the chance to thrive offering a wide range of youth activities and programs designed to nurture physical health, emotional well-being, academic growth and strong character. Through their after-school and summer programs, youth have the opportunity to work in the garden and dome greenhouse to experience growing food from seed to table.
As the weather warms, they focus on starting seedlings for spring and summer planting. Everything they grow gets harvested for their programs including in the kitchen to cook for meals and snacks. Cooking from their gardens is a great way for the youth to be able to see their hard work pay off and get to (literally) eat the fruits of their labor!
In addition, they have incorporated smaller programs within the garden to support agricultural education such as beekeeping and a composting program. The beekeeping program allows the students to see up close live demonstrations of the step-by-step process by which honey is made and processed as well as learning about why it is important to protect pollinators. For the compost program, they have worked with a local company called ScrapDogs that allows the students to put all of their kitchen scraps and waste into buckets that get collected by the ScrapDog employees. These employees take the food waste, burn it and add it to a compost pile. As part of the program, they can request compost sacks to be delivered to their program, illustrating another great way to have a full circle lesson of how food waste can be composted into nutritious garden soil.
Activities include hosting their Annual Seedling Sale in May which supports their After School Program Garden Club, Family Dinner Nights, Garden Plot Rentals for community members (including the use of tools and with a water source) as well as their Greenhouse to Your House program providing free, pre-packed meal kits to families in their childcare programs once per week.
A goal this year for the summer program is to teach cooking lessons to the youth that attend. Cooking will show them how the produce they harvest straight from the garden can be served at the table. Examples of cooking lessons will be how to prepare meals for school, proper cutting etiquette, making smoothies, freezing veggies, recipes for cooking and baking and more! In addition, they hope to incorporate more homesteading lessons such as canning and pickling as well to inspire and help the students gain real-world life skills that they can take with them throughout their life.
Want to know more?!
- Website: clubaycc.org
- Email Emily Shepherd, Garden Educator at eshepherd@clubaycc.org
- ScrapDogs Community Compost
- Cooking in Your School Garden
