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Eat (and Grow) Your Veggies |
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by Dan Veaner
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Friday, 30 May 2008 |
How do you get your preschooler to eat vegetables? That's a question every parent asks, and the answer is often elusive. Tompkins Community Action's Sheila Bowman and Rachael Fish are hoping that the answer is for the children to grow them themselves. " We want to see if they will eat more vegetables after we have done all of this education in the classroom about gardening and vegetables," Bowman says. "We actually planted them right in the classroom. We're hoping that their consumption increases after all of this hard work is put in."
Last week Lansing's Head Start class was up bright and early,
planting nine garden boxes outside the elementary school. While adults
hauled dirt and raked, kids helped out by helping to shovel dirt into a
wheelbarrow, and by playing with worms they dug up.
The project is the result of a $500 grant that Fish obtained from the
New York State Association for the Education of Young Children
(NYSAEYC). She applied after being approached by Cornell researcher
Christine Porter. "She came to our management and said 'We would like
to do a study on how gardens change the way preschool children eat
vegetables,'" Fish says. "I loved the idea, because I'm a health nut.
So I put the grant together and went with it. Our purpose is to
increase the consumption of vegetables, as well as try to teach
families how to do this at home. We want to see if it changes the
consumption of vegetables, as well as giving children an interest in
gardening."
Kids and their families had input into what vegetables they would
plant. In December they planted their vegetables in pots, which were
sent to Dan Segal to care for at The Plantsmen Nursery until they were
ready to plant. They planted lettuce, radishes, turnips, tomatoes,
carrots, sugar snap peas, beets, chives, and pumpkins. Each box will
be tended by two children, with the ninth box cared for by the staff.
Trumansburg is being used as a 'control' site for the study, because it
has a similarly sized program. Fish says that the difference between
Trumansburg and Lansing is that kids here eat fewer vegetables.
"Trumansburg had more carbohydrates," she says. "Only three of them
didn't eat the vegetables, but here only three ate the vegetables and
everyone else had carbs. We'll see if that changes."
Children in the program will be able to take vegetables home for free
throughout the summer, which could mean a big savings for their
families at the grocery store. "We're hoping that by the time we
harvest the vegetables that the kids will be interested in eating more
vegetables," Bowman says. "Even if the grant is not renewable we are
hoping to continue this and have families involved over the summer to
come harvest."
Bowman says she is relying on her taching assistant Deb Chaffee as the
gardening expert. And Dan Segal, an expert in indigenous plants, has
provided help and advice. "He has been awesome," Bowman says. "Any
question we've had about what will live in this area, he has been an
amazing resource. After we planted he housed all of our plants so they
would survive until we could plant them in the boxes."
Tompkins Community Action runs preschool programs around Tompkins
County. Fish is the Family Involvement Coordinator, while Bowman is
the teacher in Lansing. The pair see the project as a model for future
projects across the county. Fish says she has applied for an
additional $10,000 to expand their project to the other Head Start
sites.
"I think they're so much more likely to eat them fresh from the garden
than prepared and cut up," Fish says. "They get to see where it comes
from, and how they get their food. It's a really great project." |
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