Healthy Eaters, Strong Minds: What School Gardens Teach Kids
Tall brick walls conceal a colorful garden at Eastern Senior High School in Washington, D.C., where students like Romario Bramwell, 17, harvest flowers and produce. The program is run by City Blossoms, a nonprofit that brings gardens to urban areas.
Lydia Thompson/NPR
School is still out for the summer, but at Eastern Senior High School in Washington, D.C., students are hard at work – outdoors.
In a garden filled with flowers and beds bursting with vegetables and herbs, nearly a dozen teenagers are harvesting vegetables for the weekend's farmers market.
Roshawn Little is going into her junior year at Eastern, and has been working in this garden for three years now. "I didn't really like bugs or dirt," Little says, thinking back to when she got started. "Well, I still don't really like bugs, but I like the dirt," she laughs. She gathers a hand full of greens, yanks from the stem and pulls up a baseball-sized beet.
During the summer, Little gets paid to work Tuesday through Saturday from 9 a.m. until 2 p.m. with City Blossoms, a nonprofit that brings community gardens to schools, community centers and other places where kids gather in urban areas.
Little believes that working in the garden has taught her to try all sorts of new things — like eating different kinds of vegetables more often. And she's taken those healthy behaviors home with her. Little brings home vegetables from the garden, and she says her eating habits have encouraged her family to buy more fruits and vegetables.
Lydia Thompson/NPR
"We're a chubby family and we love to eat. Well, I do," she adds with a laugh. "We mainly live around liquor stores and snack stores. There aren't that many grocery stores. They're way out and you have to drive so far" – a common problem in low-income urban areas. "It seems so pointless, when there are snack stores right there," she says.
City Blossoms is one of many groups across the country teaming up with local communities to install school gardens, like the one at Eastern, in areas with low access