The Community Garden Project (CGP)
is an initiative of Palms Solutions and the Monumental Baptist Church in collaboration with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, teaching children about growing food with a focus on education, nutritional health, science, and environmental importance behind it. Since its inception in 2012, CGP has taught more than a fifty children and adults, the nutritional value of growing fruits and vegetables, preparing healthy meals, recycling and reusing water and natural fertilizer. We also use our program to teach service-learning skills, develop youth leaders, and foster accountability and teamwork.
The Community Garden Project aims to help strengthen the prevention of childhood obesity, diabetes, and hunger by instilling the love for gardening in the hearts of children and youth especially in neighborhoods where problems such as drugs, crime, poor health, and financial hardship are part of everyday life. The first phase of our project was a complete success, on four beds, we were able to plant and harvest more than 200 pounds of tomatoes, eggplants, cabbages, collard greens, carrots, kales, beets, lettuces, potatoes, onions and peppers as well as herbs including basils dills parsley, thyme, oregano.
Our children are learning many lessons through gardening and other educational aspects of gardening including: Science. Talking about the life cycle of a plant. Which seeds grow faster? Math. Counting seeds, spacing them and comparing their sizes. Art. Drawing pictures of pictures of the vegetable on their pots. Moreover the kids were also taught about the garden’ structure, and some of the economic factors that govern gardening.. View more pictures