Our Generous Garden

Want children to embrace active, healthy living? Get them out in the garden! Not only is gardening great exercise, but growing your own fruits and vegetables teaches valuable lessons. Research shows children who grow their own vegetables are more likely to eat them. If you support the sustainable, locavore food movement, you can't get any more local than your own backyard. Gardens also boost children's creativity: They are the perfect places for quiet observation, exploration and hands-on learning. And, gardening connects us to nature, making us better environmental stewards. It was for these reasons Anne Nagro began coordinating her local elementary school's seed-to-harvest garden program for 400 students. Her home gardens had always been a place of discovery for her own children and she wanted more youngsters to get outdoors and experience this first hand. During the past 10 years, she's seen children plant seeds for the first time, taste cherry tomatoes for the first time, and learn about the earth's amazing systems by digging in the soil, breathing fresh air, and smelling, touching and tasting herbs and vegetables. Students have learned they can change their community by working together: Over the years they have donated more than 5,000 pounds of produce to the local food pantry to help local families in need. Anne's involvement in this program inspired her to write the children's book, Our Generous Garden, which received praise from, among others, former California First Lady Maria Shriver, Connecticut Public Radio, and Mel Bartholomew, author of America's best-selling garden book, Square Foot Gardening. She then wrote, Our Super Garden, a children's book teaching healthy eating by eating what we grow. This book contains 20 kid-tested recipes from youth garden programs across the country. To help others create youth gardens, Anne started www.GardenABCs.com, which gives garden start-up advice, highlights activities to do in the garden each month, garden-based lessons, funding sources, and much more. She writes for trade and consumer publications.