making thumbs green without paint

One of my gigs is school gardens. Building, maintaining, planting, creating, whatever you want. My friend Stephanie and I started small, just getting one in at our kid’s middle school. We really just wanted to enrich the science curriculum and get some fresh food into the cafeteria but it has morphed into this amazing way to teach kids about food and where it comes from. A lot of the kids have never really put their hands into soil before let alone grown anything with those little hands of theirs. Most of them are totally convinced that their food comes off the shelves in Safeway.
Some of them are way to cool to be messing around with some crazy old ladies and wormy dirt but the cool factor disappears in about five minutes when they realize that they are actually part of this idea that that can actually grow something. As soon as this happen we no longer have to worry about vandalism because if these kids catch any of their posse messing with the garden and their pepper plant, some ass is gonna be kicked. They check their plants daily. We love bringing them over to the green side.
Getting them to try it is another story. Most of them will eat dang near anything I put in their hands but there is the ick contingency and depending on the popularity of the ick person it can trigger a chain of icks and then no one will try anything. We are starting to do cooking demonstrations in the garden with the stuff that we grow at lunch time. We are starting this at the high school where there is a closed campus policy so we have a sort of captive audience if you will.
Hope they like the beets……..