From Seed to Harvest By Laura Winter By Frank Kownacki Oh, the power of a seed! Take one Mammoth sunflower seed, smaller than the end of your pinkie finger, plant it and what do you get?—A beautiful garden. The legacy of that one seed is infinite year after year as it self-seeds and multiplies. It doesn’t take much to start a garden; the challenge is to keep it well-tended and fruitful. With the help of the community of the Mexican War Streets and Central Northside, the Green Millennium Children’s Garden (GMCG) has grown and prospered. The GMCG project transformed an abandoned, weedy, trash-strewn lot into a community gathering place for children and adults alike. The garden was established six years ago and continues to grow and blossom each year. By involving neighborhood kids from the beginning, the GMCG created a sense of community ownership and fostered a foundation of respect, upon which the fledgling project could flourish. This program accomplishes more than just developing green space, however; it provides a garden-based educational activity that focuses on ecology, nutrition and art, classes, access to children’s gardening books, and field trips. It also seeks to provide them with an optimistic sense of ownership in their community, to use nature as the educational medium in an urban setting, and, with time, to give them the “permission” to be leaders in their own right. The GMCG also helps people find the impetus to be less accepting of inequitable conditions in their communities, as well as in their own lives. The Green Millennium Children’s Garden believes that by introducing students to the community beyond the classroom, and by implementing programs that support creative thinking and collaboration, they can inspire these children to think of their lives in terms of possibilities, and also teach them to apply such creative thinking to all of their activities. Get a group of neighborhood kids together, add dirt and a space to play, and you have a recipe for fun! At the GMCG, they plant, they play and they explore. They plant interesting things like green zebra tomatoes, Easter eggplant, lime basil, dinosaur kale, blue potatoes, eight ball zucchini and lots and lots of flowers. They plant many other types of fruits and vegetables, and the kids take home what they harvest. Sometimes the GMCG makes a tasty salad right on site! This year there are plans to make pizza right on the grill. Yum! At the GMCG, they dig in the dirt, they color, they make seed mosaics, they dig in the dirt, they have water balloon tosses, they dig in the dirt, when it’s hot they run through the sprinkler, and, of course, then they dig in the dirt some more. At the Green Millennium Children’s Garden, there is always something to explore—counting rings on a worm under the magnifying glass, observing how each petal on a marigold in turn becomes a seed, or comparing the spicy taste of a nasturtium flower to the lettuce-like taste of a daylily. Laura Winter is now in her 11th summer of coordinating a children’s community garden. “I am lucky to have found my passion,” says Winter. “Observing children’s sense of wonder and excitement as they play and explore in the garden is a gift. I couldn’t ask for anything more. I would like to again thank everyone—too many people and groups to name here—for all their encouragement and support, which has helped make this project a success.” Plant and in-kind donations are always welcome. If you are interested in visiting the Green Millennium Children’s Garden or learning more about it, feel free to contact Laura Winter, Penn State Master Gardener, at (412) 231-1057 or via email at msmia6477@yahoo.com