NHMG Children's Garden 2018

With the coming of June, the Children's Garden at Hills Horizons got underway on a beautiful sunny day! Children from the nearby Kids Camp trekked over to get some real gardening experience with our NHMG volunteers.

To begin our day, NHMG Sharon Henry brought a picture book about gardening to read with the children, and then they had a turn with gardening tools (trowel, claw, and weed digger) to plant the seedlings that they had started at their school earlier this spring.

Who loves pizza more than kids? The kids got to plant pizza ingredients (including tomatoes, basil, onions, eggplant, and peppers) in hula-hoop sized giant pizza garden plots! Along the way, they got to dig in the dirt, label the plants, and water their new garden project. They even made friends with some creepy crawlers, like worms, centipedes, and beetles.

The children also planted more traditional gardening rows with seeds of carrots, radishes, and lettuce, with a pollinator flower garden nearby. Another garden bed teaming with strawberry plants shared some space with the cabbage, kale, broccoli, and watermelon plants that the kids had started from seed. What a delicious and rewarding experience this summer will be for our young gardeners!

With all the seeds and plants in the ground and watered, the group was satisfied with the opportunity to get a hands-on growing experience with lots of fun in the dirt and water! And the NHMG volunteers got to share the wonders and skills of gardening with a new generation who may cherish this experience as much as we did. We will meet weekly with our gardening kids until the end of July, so they can see the progress of their garden and enjoy the harvest and taste of fresh strawberries, carrots, radishes, and more!