While many Rye residents hire gardeners to set up and manage their flowerbeds and decorative plantings, the Rye YMCA and Rye Nature Center teamed up to encourage families to do their own gardening – with the focus on edibility rather than curb appeal.

By Bill Lawyer

While many Rye residents hire gardeners to set up and manage their flowerbeds and decorative plantings, the Rye YMCA and Rye Nature Center teamed up to encourage families to do their own gardening – with the focus on edibility rather than curb appeal.

 

Farmer Mike Krug led a series of Sunday afternoon programs, starting in mid-March. Unfortunately, the fourth and final session (which was scheduled for Earth Day) had to be cancelled due to heavy rain.

 

Krug started off in environmental studies, but while in a graduate program at the University of Montana became involved with a student-run farm and switched careers. Now the farm manager for a property in Connecticut, he worked previously as a garden and landscape apprentice at the Stone Barns Center in Pocantico Hills.

 

Family gardening may have been the title of the series, but each unit was firmly “planted” in the concepts of nature and the environment. In the first unit, “Playing in the Dirt,” participants learned how to make “soil soup”, which gave them a better understanding of how the vegetables and fruits we eat depend on healthy soil.

 

Next came “Worms Made My Lunch”, which focused on collecting and examining the many micro and macro invertebrates that are important in plant growth.

 

Unit three, “Gardening Like a Forest,” used the distribution of trees and shrubs around the nature center as a lesson plan for why each type grows where it does.

 

About 15 parents, grandparents and children participated in the sessions, which were free for Nature Center and Y members.

“They really got excited about seeing what’s in the soil, and how plants grow,” said the Y’s Lisa Urban, coordinator of community relations.

 

Participants learned that the successful growing of fruits and vegetables requires attention to the “terroir”, as the French put it, notably the amount of light and condition of the soil.

 

And sustainable farming, stressed Farmer Mike, requires people to learn from nature how to work in harmony with their local environment.

 

Funding for the program was provided by a grant from the United Way. Other programs funded as part of this grant are the Intergenerational Gardening project, teaming up Osborn School students with residents of The Osborn, and an upcoming series of activities at the Nature Center with children from Port Chester’s Head Start program.

 

These programs are just the beginning, says Urban. “We’ll be working over the summer to identify additional funding sources and partners to help us promote the health, nutritional, and environmental benefits of ‘hands-on’ gardening.”