Today was a banner day in our partnership with Share Our Strength – we opened our second Good Food Garden and we got to share it with hundres of famlies at the South Beach Food and Wine Festival!  Built on site at the Fun & Fit as a Family event, the Garden was met with incredible enthusiasm--the kind of enthusiasm that encouraged every visitor to reach in and touch, smell, and taste with reckless abandon. Sure, we lost many under ripe tomatoes to curious fingers (like 8-year-old Brian Valdes' above), and ripe ones to taste buds of all ages, but there was so much energy that the garden seemed to regenerate itself every hour.

The most enthusiastic visitors, of course, are the radiant young ladies from the Boys And Girls Club of Palm Beach County, and their fearless leader Lottie Gatewood.  In just a few days, the garden will make its permanent home at their club in Palm Beach, where this very resourceful group of young ladies are starting a food co-op and a program they call "Rise and Shine" to bring the benefits of their Good Food Garden to their whole community. How inspiring!

We’d had already heard a lot about the gals before we met them, but we found the joy and light they carried with them even more beautiful than we had hoped. And their gratitude was immeasurable---so graciously expressed in their laughter and delight as they walked around their new garden. We plucked pieces and fennel and arugula to tuck behind our ears and posed for pictures, but the real fun began as we went through the garden, plant by plant, and talked about their plans for the garden once they got it back home. I'm quite certain that we will hear from them, and that you will find their enthusiasm and gratitude as inspiring as we did!  

This garden brings us one step closer to our goal of increasing access to fresh, nutritious foods for kids all across the country—and one garden closer to a greener, more beautiful planet for all!

Are you ready to dig in?

HEre I am (far left) with our newest Good Food Gardeners: Stefani Duelfer, Lottie Gatewood, Taylor Ambrose, Alexandra Hollis and Brianna Hollis!

Breaking Ground
South Beach, Miami

While the ground is thawing back in New York, we are breaking ground for our second Good Food Garden here in Miami, Florida, where warm weather and plenty of sunshine make for perfect gardening conditions. Share Our Strength's Kelly Trimyer, Joe Allegra, and Tamra McCraw arrived at Fun & Fit as a Family this afternoon just in time to get our hands dirty. Mark, Jaime and Cory, from Teich Garden Systems, had already constructed the gorgeous 30 foot wooden structure and temporarily filled it with dozens of varieties of plants and herbs from a local organic nursery.

Before long, we had all hands on deck---hauling 30 pound bags of soil and filling the garden's clever compartments with the luscious black dirt. We pruned, trimmed and arranged every plant--from Lufa plant (yes, it grows on a vine!) to lemongrass to green zebra tomatoes-- into the soil so it would be ready for our VIP visitors the next day---Lottie and the gals from the West Palm Beach Boys and Girl's Club, who will give our second Good Food Garden a home. 

Although most of the hard work had already been done by the Teich team, (I admit I'm better at pruning plants than planing wood) I couldn't help but feel a great surge of pride and camaraderie as we dug into the dirt and built the garden side-by-side. Once again, I experienced the Share Our Strength spirit at its best.

This week, we will be launching our second Good Food Garden in Miami, Florida during the South Beach Food and Wine Festival. Part of our Good Food Gardens team is building the garden as we speak, which is big cause for celebration---our Good Food Garden community is growing!

One of the best things about a growing community of Good Food Gardeners is the opportunity to Share Our Strength in even more ways---To share our harvest with those who need it, to share our ideas about gardening, and even to share seeds to grow healthier, stronger gardens across the country -- which means healthier, stronger kids too!

Gardeners are notorious for sharing. If you’re lucky enough to have a neighbor or friend with a backyard garden you’ve probably been the beneficiary of a bundle of herbs, a basket of tomatoes or several pounds of zucchini (those things grow like weeds!).

But the sharing usually begins long before the ground thaws in a ritual called seed swapping. This week, just as I was adding a seed swapping lesson to our Good Food Garden curriculum, I got an email from a member of my own community garden, Two Coves Garden, here in New York, which read:

“April 13th is the official last frost date in New York City! Who wants to swap seeds? I have more seeds than I can use, and I’d love to see them go to good homes.”

I quickly responded, offering seeds we’d saved from last year’s harvest of Hungarian Peppers, and a batch of heirloom tomato seeds I’d been given by a French tomato farmer in Provence.

“Oooh, covet,” my fellow gardener responded. “I’ll trade you a Cherokee purple tomato seedling for some French ones!”

Visions of heirloom tomato salads danced in my head, and so the season begins!

My fellow gardener’s hail from all over the world -- Hungary, Poland, Puerto Rico, Queens (New York), Missouri and Manhattan (to name a few)—a melting pot that yields vegetal variety galore. Variety is not only excellent for the palate and plate, its essential for good health—for humans, and for the soil.

Swapping seeds is an excellent tool for building community and for spreading good nutrition across the land. Not all the seeds that you swap will work in your soil or climate, but that’s all part of the great experiment. So dig in!

P.S. If you don't have your own garden, consider swapping a different kind of seed---seeds of ideas and inspiration for how to get a garden started in your community.