After the break watch a video, "Planting the Seeds of Hope," and see the story appearing on this week's Living in Eden Prairie page in the Eden Prairie News.

Story by Forrest Adams

Community outreach programs from the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum provide hands-on learning opportunities each summer to kids in Minneapolis and St. Paul who otherwise wouldn’t have them.

On a recent Thursday, the hot air was rising from the pavement; the temperature was a humid 83 degrees; and in the Phillips neighborhood of Minneapolis, the countdown was on.

A short line of students with green plastic watering cans chanted 5-4-3-2-1, while their teacher, Xavier Porter, readied the water hose in his hand for the child in front of him. It was the child’s privilege to be first in line. He glanced nervously over his shoulder in anticipation. Porter’s smile eclipsed the surroundings, and at the count of 1 he turned the cool water hose on the giggling boy, a brief respite from the heat.

Then it was back to work in the community garden. Kids watered and weeded their vegetables and flowers as part of their gardening curriculum. Porter is one of their teachers.

The outreach programs - Urban Children’s Garden in Residence, Growing to College and City Fresh - have added color, a depth of understanding life, an appreciation of nature and a fresh outlook to hundreds of inner-city youth. Kids who are otherwise surrounded by roads, buildings and concrete find themselves planting vegetable seeds and flowers in black dirt, then tending and watching them grow.

Urban Children’s Garden

Urban Children’s Garden in Residence is a summer program that serves about 200 children ranging from 5 to 9 years of age at urban garden sites in Minneapolis and St. Paul.
The program sets kids up with a small garden plot in a community garden and then supplies them with seeds, plants, tools and teachers. Children plant beets, tomatoes, radishes, sunflowers, onions, beans, vincas and more.

“The first day of the program, they plant these themselves,” said Nancy Nelson, the lead Urban Children’s Garden educator from the Arboretum. “Some are started plants already, and some are seed. They can watch both of those grow. They take care of them.”

The Arboretum’s partner in this venture is the community organization known as Kaleidoscope. The kids attend hands-on gardening classes taught by Arboretum staff once each week for seven weeks. The instruction is intended to teach them about gardening, science and nutrition.

Kim Kube is the enthusiastic teacher. A University of Minnesota graduate, she’s in charge of children’s education instruction at the Arboretum.

“It’s the most fun job you could ever imagine,” she said. “You get to be outside. You get to garden. You get to be with kids and teach them really cool things about nature. It’s a great job. A lot of the kids come back from year to year, and it’s great that they remember what you taught them last summer and then make the solid connection.”

This is her fourth year teaching in urban gardening. She determines what gets planted and taught. The topics might include weeds, flowers, pollination and photosynthesis. Classes are science-based and last 45 minutes. Many people now on the Arboretum teaching team under her tutelage have come through the urban gardening program themselves - teachers such as Xavier Porter, a 19-year-old who has been involved with Arboretum programming for a decade and is happy to share what he has learned.

“I’ve learned to respect nature more and my perspective toward flowers and stuff has changed a lot,” he said while filling up watering cans and advising the kids how to best care for their plants. “It’s really a cool experience to see the kids coming here and doing something that I was doing. Hopefully, they’ll get involved with it as much as I have.”

He overcame barriers, including shyness, to be a teacher, said Nelson. He has been teaching since the summer of 2006. Now working on his general studies at North Hennepin Community College, Porter hopes to eventually go to medical school because he said he enjoys helping people. He also teaches in the urban gardening programs in north Minneapolis.

As a youth, he went through the program under the instruction of Tim Kenny, to whom Nelson referred as the program architect. For his part, Kenny said the idea was to take the popular in-house gardening program, which is offered to kids during the summer at the Arboretum, to those who are unable to take part in it because they’re cut off geographically and/or economically.
Other teachers, including Christian DeLeon, 18, also attribute their involvement to Kenny. DeLeon has been involved for 10 years and said at the annual urban gardening picnic earlier this month at the Arboretum that he enjoys passing on what he has learned to the kids.

“You tell them about stuff they don’t know, just like I was told when I was their age,” he said. “Since I was a kid I liked to plant, get my hands dirty. I’ve seen a lot of things I would have never seen. I never knew how to plant a garden or take care of plants. Now I’m really good at it.”
After the growing season ends, Nelson harvests the food and brings it to a food shelf.

Graduates of the Children’s Garden in Residence program have the opportunity to apply for summer work experience in the garden-based work experience programs. These work experience programs are conducted in partnership with neighborhood sponsor agencies, like Kaleidoscope, where the program director Maria Cooper, explained why she likes the partnership with the Arboretum.

“I feel that kids need to have a space to grow,” she said. “I feel that kids need to have a natural space to go, especially when you get into the city. In the city, everything is cement and buildings. You need to have a garden or someplace to dig around for worms and plant vegetables and learn where food comes from. A lot of the parents enroll their kids (in Kaleidoscope) because of the partnership with the Arboretum. It’s not something that they get to experience at home because a lot of them live in apartments. They enroll them here, so they can experience having a garden plot.”

Growing to college

This program is for kids in fifth and sixth grade who have graduated from Children’s Garden in Residence but are not old enough for City Fresh, the next garden outreach program. The idea is to implant in them the idea that they can do great things and keep them engaged with horticulture.
“We want to sprinkle this through all the programs - thinking about college and thinking about the future,” said Randy Gage, City Fresh coordinator. “With a lot of these kids, it’s not an expected thing that they’ll go to college. A program like this can help to infuse college into their culture.”
In this program, kids spend time on the University of Minnesota, St. Paul campus, learning skills that they can use in City Fresh.

City Fresh

City Fresh this year is attended by 32 teenagers who are learning about vegetables, flowers, communications, photography or instruction. In two of the areas, the students participate in a hands-on entrepreneurial-based venture. The vegetable group sells specialty produce to local restaurants; the flowers group sells fresh floral arrangements to area businesses.

Gage, who is in his sixth summer with the program, said he values the connections he sees kids making to the environment and the natural world “in their own place and their own setting” through the program.

“One of the things I see every summer is the pride that has developed in growing something and selling it,” he said. “We’re creating a safe experience for them to meet adult mentors and have some of those experiences where they can see how the adult life works.”

Readers can contact Forrest Adams at fadams@swpub.com.