by Kathy Bego
Illuminated by the glinting early evening sun, teenage participants in FitKids and their families planted ten raised garden beds in UCOM’s community garden at Marquette Park this week. From late May through early August, families from FitKids will join HOPE Gardens staff on Wednesday nights to garden together.
Each Wednesday evening begins with a meeting in a picnic shelter, where FitKids staff discuss themes such as goal setting, CPR training, and mindfulness. Following these discussions, the families will tend to the gardens, planting, weeding, and harvesting, while listening to garden talks related to the FitKids themes. For instance, during the week FitKids covers mentorship, the discussion will focus on vertical gardening on trellises, emphasizing that both people and plants need support.
These collaborative FitKids and HOPE Garden evenings are organized into two sessions: the first hour for Spanish speakers and the second hour for English speakers. During the first week’s session, Julie and the HOPE Gardens team introduced companion planting, an approach where mutually beneficial plants are grown together. Families used illustrated charts of symbiotic plants to choose which vegetables to add to boxes where they had already planted a central or “star” plant, such as peppers.
Teen participants, along with their parents and younger siblings, dug holes, slipped plants out of their pots, and placed them into their new garden homes. Arthur provided a useful planting demonstration, guiding families in planting tomatoes. One parent was glad to learn how to expand her garden by adding complementary plants to her pepper and tomato plants. Everyone was able to take a plant home to jumpstart their own gardens.