Summer at the Family Garden

Posted in Programs and Events on July 17 2008, by Plant Talk

Annie Novak is coordinator of the Children’s Gardening Program at The New York Botanical Garden.

July finds the Ruth Rea Howell Family Garden poised on the threshold of summer’s cornucopia—all promise and no produce. Okay, so there are onions. And sure, there’s rainbow Swiss chard, spicy loops of garlic flowers (scapes), and the last sweet snap peas before summer’s heat hits. But to our staff, without the happy buzz of the Children’s Gardening Program, it’s a two-acre ghost town. The vegetable beds are marked by towers of bolted lettuce. Tomato branches stick out as awkwardly as a scarecrow’s arms, while weeds fill in every available space below. Our beds seem to be groaning with the gangly green adolescence of plants. Looking over at the plots, it’s hard to imagine the bounty of eggplants, squash, cucumbers, and beans we’ll be cooking in a few short weeks. No, right now there are a lot of weeds. And not enough small hands in our plots—120 pairs of hands, in fact.

So with much anticipation, the beginning of our summer gardening program this past week left us both exhilarated and exhausted—nearly 200 children, instructors, volunteers, and parents pack into our two acres every Tuesday and Thursday morning (and another 100 every Saturday). Thankfully, at the end of each day, we feel mostly the former—an enthusiasm that has kept our program attendance burgeoning every year and our garden plots even richer as we continue to grow. Our Garden Sprouts offering is for children ages 3–5, and our Garden Crafters is for children 6–12.

One morning a returning Crafter, bent low between a row of peppers struggling to work through a thick patch of nutsedge, one of our most undesirable weeds, shook her head ruefully. “We stayed away too long,” she said, wiping her brow. “They’re taking over.” Happier news came when her instructor pointed out low-lying purslane, a succulent that snuck in between many of our crops. Popping it into his mouth, one seven-year-old Crafter reached a happy verdict: “It’s lemony!”

His planting partner, looking up from a careful investigation of his own section of the plot, had found an even better treasure: the first Sungold tomato of the season, bright orange among the green tangle. (Photo by Toby Adams)