Reflecting on 2024 and Growing Together in 2025
As 2024 comes to a close, we’re proud to reflect on a year filled with growth, education, and community impact. This year, HOPE Gardens reached 2,641 students in garden and nutrition classes that inspired young minds and fostered a love for healthy living. From engaging students to hosting workshops and our successful heirloom plant sale, […]
From Soil to Plate: First Graders Discover the Journey of Food
By Angie Bruder, Garden Educator How does food get here? Does it just appear in stores? To answer that question, first graders at West Godwin explored the fascinating journey of cornflakes from soil to plate. Students learned that all foods come from nature, and then many foods are trucked to factories for processing and packaging. […]
A Family School Garden Adventure at STEM Night!
We loved being a part of West Elementary’s STEM Night, showcasing the beautiful garden that students helped create! Families enjoyed a fruit salsa tasting and were given a kid-friendly recipe cookbook before heading out to explore the school garden. For many parents, it was their first time seeing the garden, and their children proudly led […]
Julie’s Fresh Heirloom Tomato Salad
This tomato salad recipe is inspired by my nature-based garden in Michigan, where a variety of heirloom tomatoes brings vibrant color and fresh flavor to every dish. We started gardening this way over a decade ago, and now it’s a lush, thriving space that yields beautiful fruit with minimal effort. At this time of year, […]
From Bloom to Seed: Harvesting Sunflowers for Next Season’s Growth
Harvesting Sunflowers!
A Beautiful Harvest: FitKids360 Summer Celebration
This summer, we had the most beautiful time harvesting, preparing, and sharing a meal with the families we’ve been gardening with as part of our collaboration with FitKids360! It was a celebration of the hard work, care, and dedication these families put into growing their gardens, and the results were nothing short of amazing. As […]
JW Marriott Supports Garden Education
H.O.P.E. Gardens is thrilled to announce an exciting new partnership with JW Marriott, which has purchased 300 of our organically-grown plants to create a stunning plant wall at their hotel. This collaboration beautifies the hotel and significantly supports our mission of providing garden education to schools in Wyoming, MI. H.O.P.E. Gardens is dedicated to fostering […]
Growing Future Gardeners!
At H.O.P.E. Gardens, one of our most important missions is to teach children how to grow their own food. A cornerstone of this educational endeavor is our commitment to heirloom plants. By focusing on these traditional varieties, we not only preserve biodiversity but also offer a tangible link to the past, showing students the value […]
Growing Green: Teaching Kids the Value of Garden Produce through Fun and Games
by Kathy Bego, Garden Educator During our April classes, kids engaged in well-designed “Fun and Games” to learn that the vegetables they grow in their school gardens are worth money! A short slide deck introduced the monetary value of produce by featuring shots of an abundant school garden harvest and a grocery store flier.A clip […]
Winter Sowing!
Convert spring fever into spring seedlings with Winter Sowing! For “winter sowing”, we plant seeds in milk jugs or other semi-transparent plastic containers. Placed outside in January or February, these mini-greenhouses expose seeds to the cold temperatures that some wildflowers and other perennials need to experience before germinating. How about broccoli, kale, or dill? The […]