Hello out there!

My name is Cameron and I am yet another member of the Apple Corps Team. I work at the Delridge Neighborhoods Development Association (DNDA) in the Delridge community of West Seattle.  I run the Family Gardening Program, helping individuals and families at 8 affordable housing sites access resources to learn about, build, and maintain edible gardens as a source of food. Each of the 8 mini-communities is incredibly different. One has over 20 container beds that are passionately gardened by nearly a dozen individuals/families. Another community had 10 beds built last spring but needs a lot of motivation. With another, I am working with a few excited residents to have their first two garden beds built by the end of this month. I wont bore you with the details of each community, but hopefully that provides a sense of how different each community is in terms of their relationship to edible gardening.

A major aspect of my position right now is to run after school programs for kids at 3 of the housing sites that we call Spring Garden Club. Kids that live in each community can come for an hour and half once a week to learn about growing and caring for plants and healthy eating. Each Garden Club typically has 5-10 kids varying in age from 4 to 12 years old. We play games, do an activity in the garden, make an arts-and-crafts project, and eat a healthy snack. We’ve started by learning a lot about the aspects the garden system (soil, water, bugs, etc), planting seeds, and caring for our seedlings.  We started seeds indoors and planted some directly in the garden and have been excitedly watching the progress.

Broccoli, Lettuce, Onion, Carrot, Tomato, Hot Pepper, and Sweet Pepper seeds growing indoors for 2 of the 3 Garden Clubs.

One of the many beautiful creations from our rock painting activity (made by a 6 yr old!). We’ve also made seed art, potato people, and garden markers.

Digging for worms! Not the intended activity for the day, but we adapted and the kids learned a lot about worms that day.

The Garden Clubs will last through the end of June. As they continue, we will learn about seasons, climate, vitamins, bees, and much more, and make snacks out of the produce we grow. We also have tons of fun art projects planned such as making a scarecrow and garden collages.

Thanks for reading!