 If you watch Common Ground Online, consider becoming a member or making a donation at lptv.org. When children are involved in a garden program like this year after year, I see leadership skills being developed within these kids and also confidence. And I know how to do this. And then those children that develop those leadership skills are then mentoring the younger kids who are coming into the program. And our goal is to keep that flow going well until kids are into adulthood and know how to grow their own food and share their own food. This is also about access. It's providing an opportunity to children that might not already have that opportunity. It takes a lot of effort to have a garden and a lot of time and a lot of patience. Well, my favorite part of the garden is because you feel really, really proud once you know you helped plant something and I like how you help get food so you can help the community. Yeah, like you make friends too and you have lots of laughs. My name is Andrea Onsted. I'm the executive director of the Boys and Girls Club of the Bemidji area. My name is Deb Dilley and I'm a SNAPEd educator with the University of Minnesota Extension. I work in the health and nutrition program. I teach nutrition to a lot of fourth and fifth grade students throughout Beltrami County and I'm the garden manager for the Boys and Girls Club. She is invaluable. She has so much experience and expertise and she knows how to work with kids. Eleven years ago when I came to the Boys and Girls Club and approached them with the idea of what do you think about having a garden? Well, we can try this and we built one single raised bed behind the club and we decided to title it a pizza garden. And so it was one raised bed that had like tomatoes and green peppers so that they could make pizza from those vegetables. Well, it went pretty well. So we continued year after year after year adding another garden bed up until we got to, I think, nine or ten raised garden beds behind the club. At that point, the program seemed to be going pretty well. Kids were engaged. Kids loved the gardening. We were doing lots of food preparation from the garden. The kids were involved in actually planting and harvesting. We decided that maybe we would take it a little bit further. And then in 2012, we got a grant from the Natural Resource Conservation Corps for the greenhouse which technically is a high tunnel because we don't heat it. That high tunnel now allowed us to extend our growing season by a couple of months and decided to have raised beds inside that high tunnel. And so that changed our program to where the kids were able to plant earlier and harvest later and it gave us much more produce than we had been growing before because the growing season is so much longer. And beyond that, now this past year we expanded that with an additional 15 raised beds. So we began actually having the children plant seeds inside in the middle of the winter in January because by April we're able to transplant out to the high tunnel. So this was a change for us. We decided that we no longer were going to be needing donations from greenhouses but that we were going to take this program to an actual seed to table type of learning program. So the children would be planting the seeds, putting them under grow lights and watching the seedlings grow and after about a month of doing that we would then take those seedlings, we would transplant them into a little bit larger container, continue to have them under the lights here inside. And then in April, depending on the weather, it's warm enough evenings to be able to plant out in the high tunnel. It would take us a few days and have a longer growing season. Kids love doing this and they really enjoy watching these plants grow and so many of the children have been involved with planting that seed in the dirt, watching it grow through the different transplant stages and now they're putting it outside where it's a little bit larger and then to watch it continue to grow and produce fruit or vegetables throughout the summer is amazing to these kids. So many of them have said, I had no idea that this is how we get our peppers. This is how we get our eggplant. Look at these tomatoes. Okay, doing the same thing. Being that we had an extra 15 raised garden beds outside, when those were first being developed as far as the size and where they were going to go, we met with T and K outdoors and said, you know, it would be really nice to do something like a three sisters garden Being that the Boys and Girls Club has a lot of diversity within the population of the children that attend here. There are a lot of children that have been involved with the garden that are from the Native American community and the Three Sisters Garden is a piece of that culture. So the Three Sisters Garden is where corn, beans and squash are the three vegetables that are planted and there is significance behind how they are planted. But to bring that education and that part of the culture to this garden, I think was a really important thing to do. At least two or three times during the summer, the kids will have their own little farmers market right outside the Boys and Girls Club. So what we do is we harvest what is available at that time and the kids and I come up with prices for the different items. We set out a huge table, the kids wash everything, we have a tent. It is like a farmer's market, only it is their market at their club and they, I think, take a lot of ownership in this. So the garden is a unique program because it kind of ties together nutrition, physical fitness and financial stewardship. So we're tying those three things together. We're asking them to kind of look at some of the market prices and sometimes we know what the market price is but because we want to put produce in the hands of our club families at a reasonable rate so we're going to keep it very, very cost-effective for our families. But we tie that together with a program called Money Matters and that's where they are learning some of these entrepreneurial skills. So they're learning, okay, well, you have this quantity of food and you're pricing at this, we'll then multiply that out. But through these farmer's markets, you know, our kids are learning about business, about supply, demand, what's selling, what's not selling and also how to count money. So we're teaching them those skills as well, entrepreneurial skills, physical fitness and the nutrition and making healthy choices for themselves. The culmination of our garden program for the year is highlighted in a harvest dinner that the kids are very involved in and this is the harvest of all of our produce, okay, the end of the year harvest. And so it's typically in October and we're pulling everything out of the high tunnel and everything out of the garden and coming up with a menu that's always vegetarian. We use only the produce from our garden to create, I think, a very delicious menu. This year, Chef Isaac Wally was our number one volunteer. He had seen us plant those seeds way back in February and bought produce from the club throughout the summer season and then we worked with him one-on-one to develop the menu for the harvest dinner and he helped work with our kids to create those things. The children are preparing these foods up to a week and a half, two weeks previous and then the day of we have the children in helping. It's an all-day affair. Many volunteers come in and help us out with this and during our harvest dinner, the people who actually attend are the families of the children that were involved in the garden that year as well as some of the board members, the donors and a variety of other community members that are kind of key to the club will always receive invitations as well. And it's not just about the food but it's about the pride that these kids feel in growing something and showing something to their family that they have done and that they've accomplished and that they feel so proud of. In one sense, it's about the food and introducing their families to new fruits and vegetables because that's a key thing as well but also just the excitement, the celebration of this whole program and its fruition. That ends our program for the year and then we have a couple of months where things are cleaning up, we put in the garden to rest and we have a little bit of downtime and before you know it, we're back at it planting those seeds again. Every year we survey our kids through the National Youth Outcomes Initiative so this is a boys and girls club national survey and every spring we ask our club members to give us feedback and out of that we have come to find out that our boys and girls club members eat 11% more vegetables than their national peers. So yay to that. So by having kids planting seeds and growing these plants just from little bitty seeds all the way through till we get them out doors and then they're selling the food, they're making dishes from the food, they're having a harvest dinner where they're sharing their food with the community. That whole process is I think so enlightening to kids and showing the kids how and why to respect where good food comes from, how easy it is to grow food, how delicious that food is and how to share that food with others. I think it's really important for children to see where their food is coming from. Alright, thank you. It's a very last thing. If you watch Common Ground Online, consider becoming a member or making a donation at lptv.org.