Dig 'N It

True Community Garden

Nestled amongst concrete sidewalks, chain link fencing, drainage ditches, and low-income apartments is a community garden project that is making an impact in the lives of Van Buren, Arkansas' youth. It started simple enough; teach the youth the relationship between the food pyramid, the basic food groups, and let them grow their own food so that they would be encouraged to taste new tastes. It has grown into so much more!

Twenty seven participants joined in the first year, with a total of 213 youth who have enjoyed the experience to date. The youth have grown vegetables and flowers, cotton and gourds, learning the how-to's of gardening from the River Valley Master Gardeners. Master food preservers have taught canning workshops, and entries into the Crawford County Fair and the Arkansas/Oklahoma Fair have numbered over 1300. Craft classes give creative ways to use dried garden items. Bee keeping and weather charting, photography and bird watching - just other fun things that the youth have been taught as they experience the joy of gardening! At the end of the season, a Harvest Banquet is held where the residents prepare a meal of foods grown from their garden and serve it to those who have helped make that year a success.

Funding Sources

• Greater Federation of Women's League, Van Buren
  
• Lion's Club of Van Buren
  
• Old Town Sertoma Club of Van Buren
  
• Rotary Club of Van Buren
  
• Wal-Mart
  
• A local Church hosts an alternative gift market at Christmas for its members and has donated over $1300 in the last two years
  
• Private citizens

Life Skills

The whole garden experience is about learning. Learning about gardening, about how things grow, how Mother Nature controls the ways the seeds respond. Learning where you stand in the whole scope of the world, what you have control over and how some things you just don't. The youth learn to work together as a group, what it feels like to be the only one pulling the weight. How to repay other's in the community for what they give to you. How to work hard to get something and how good it feels to know you did it all by yourself. These are life skills. Life skills that some youth aren't exposed to enough. They learn self-preservation, self-sufficiency, and, probably the most important thing of all, self-pride.