“Vegetables Make Kids Happy!”
My first photo was a photo of a few kids cutting vegetables, which went into the sauce we made at Field to Fork Club at Wellington Elementary School. Every week we teach the kids how to make healthy recipes with the vegetables we grow and give to them every Thursday! The kids at Wellington Elementary School thoroughly enjoy cooking with our vegetables and making delicious recipes. Some kids are skeptical about eating vegetables, but they always end up liking it.
“Vegetables Make Kids Happy! pt. II”
The second photo is of the finished product of the sauce and was delicious. You can see the veggies and can tell it’s fresh.
“Vegetables Make Kids Happy! pt. III”
The last photo of the sequence is the vegetables they got to take home and some whole wheat flour. They can use these ingredients to make the recipe at home. These photos made me really happy, because it is the first step to knowing how to nourish your body. Kids say vegetables are “gross” or “nasty,” but we taught them how to enjoy vegetables! The kids loved our vegetable pasta!
“The Strawberry in The Learning Garden”
The learning garden holds a very special place in my heart. An image of little kids running around and picking tomatoes and smiling comes to my mind when I think of the learning garden. Now the kids can enjoy goodies too! My co-workers and I worked very hard on that learning garden and to be able to share it with other people makes me very happy. The learning garden gives everyone in the farm a sense of community and friendship.
“Learning and Connecting”
I chose this photo because it shows how the food literacy project teaches us so much. Also, it connects us to even more opportunities to learn. I remember Jamie Burghardt teaching us about the waterfront botanical gardens, and he even gave us tips on our own gardens and tips for the farm. One thing I remember was him telling us to ask our local coffeeshop for coffee grounds to give nutrients to our plants. It is nice talking to someone so passionate about our environment.
“Learning opportunities”
This picture shows how important the work that the food literacy project is. Most elementary schools didn’t have field to fork club, and I definitely didn’t. Kids deserve this though. It’s important to teach kids how to grow and cook different vegetables and we encourage all of the kids to try the food that we cook together. I feel like there needs to be more organizations or more money being put into clubs like, this because it creates learning opportunities for young kids.
“Strawberries”
This berry etc., and other produce gives meaning to my community on this learning garden, because children come here to try new experiences in food which makes them aware that there is more to food than chips.
“Veggie YCAP”
Market life on Thursdays helps my community to have more options in their diet. Especially for those who have no access to healthy food. Plus we have many variety of options that most markets don’t.
“Celosia Brain Flower (Discoveries and Growth)”
This is a representation of me looking YCAP for the first time, or for anyone to anything. For me, everyday since the summer was always something new. Which goes for this flower as well as every other task people might take. This flower is a Celosia Brain Flower, my father grew it and told me about it. Overall it’s a message of me growing during YCAP.
“Tomato Heart”
The tomatoes are a representation of the community’s health. Everyone’s heart starts off nice, juicy, sweet and red! But with the unhealthy corporation we eat and get deceived by rots this heart and the tomatoes. Especially at a young age, we need to encourage these health habits and get other kids and even adults in fruits and veggies and that’s what YCAP’s purpose is.
“Bouquet of Kale”
You see the product where… Seeing it from the start to end, it was really… Made me happy and grateful. With the Food Literacy Project, it shows you how much we see things from start to finish, and how we influence and change the mind of teenagers and little kids too. When little kids have their garden at their school, when they see it from start to finish, they think it’s really cool and it makes them happy.
“Growing with the Kale”
This photo is just a representation of how YCAP has impacted me as a person. Since I know how to grow things now, and I have a new understanding of nutrition, vegetables, and cooking and stuff like that. I think I started last summer, I guess, and now I can grow almost anything. I know how to plant things. Anything you give me, I think I could grow it. I know how to cook with it. I work with a lot of people from my community. I think they can say things about how it can change you too. We deal with not just my community but communities all around. You know what I mean? I feel like literally YCAP changes lives, because they hired people from the community and you’re getting paid to better your health, your food choices and stuff like that. And that impacts the community because children or teenagers our age could use it. I think people, when they first hear that it’s just a farm job, they do this double take, but it’s so much more than that. And the fact that you can get paid to better yourself, I think so many teens could like in lower income neighborhoods like ours, especially because they give us vegetables to take home every week to cook with. So I feel like it would be a good job to just learn. Well, it’s different because usually teenagers, we just work in fast food and stuff. And you’re at work, you’re probably going to snack on a McDouble or fries and then that’s not good for you. You know? In our job here, we literally cook healthy delicious foods all the time. And we get this new knowledge of it and we take vegetables home. Sometimes I bring cucumbers over to my mom, and she loves them. We don’t get all that at a fast food restaurant. Well, I can now grow things. I can spread it on, I want to eat better, just add more vegetables into my diet, add more fruits. Get my stuff from farms, because farm grown is better. I care more about the farmer’s markets because I understand the process and everything just like I have this better understanding and I’ll be able to pass that on in the future. I’ve learned and grown over because of this job. It’s right here in not a rural area. We’re in the middle of civilization. We’re not in far out. We’re right in the middle of a community, and that it can be done anywhere, I guess.
“How the field to fork dinner impacted me”
This photo impacted my life because it was my first time speaking in front of a big amount of people. I got the opportunity to share my voice and how YCAP connected me to different people in my community.
“Garden Planning”
The reason why I picked these pictures is because we were talking about planning for the learning garden, and we were planning it ourselves. This is the first time we ever planned it ourselves. It made me feel really happy and responsible, because I was planning it out and I was the leader in the group that I was with. The learning garden is for when the little kids come over. And so, the learning garden is to teach them about the different vegetables, and some of the vegetables are common, but some of them are not. We picked a lemon balm, and I don’t think every kid would know what lemon balm is, and number one, it smells nice, so they’ll be drawn to it and stuff like that, and we’re teaching them about different things that they haven’t seen before.
“Garden Planning pt. II”
The way I planned it out was… It has a visual representation, so when the plants come up, they have different colors that we catch the public’s eye when they come over, and I feel like the colors that we picked, and the stuff that we picked, will make the people happy to see it. You have to be able to measure it out, because some of the vegetables need spaces, while other vegetables don’t. And also, if you put a root and a root together, it’s probably not going to grow as well, because they’re both competing against each other. So, we had to actually plan it out.
