Common Grounds Rotary Garden

[Ted Lipkin]

I would like to commend Henry Dutcher (Library Director) and Amalita Grimes ( Master Gardener and Sunny Patch Coordinator) on their great effort the last two years at Common Grounds Rotary Garden. Their mission to unite the community in the common cause and providing area food relief agencies with high quality vegetables and fruits using sustainable organic gardening practices while providing all residents of Enfield with access to opportunities for community service, educational enrichment, and leisure enjoyment of nature and each other.

I was involved last year with the garden, donating a brand new Rotor-tiller, Garden Cart and Mulch and many other small items. I think that the efforts of the volunteers and the proven results, makes this project and what people can do with pride for the community. The garden is not only functional, but under the direction of Amalita Grimes it is a beautiful as any Park.

The Sunny Patch Garden Workshops that are directed under the passion of Amalita Grimes are spectacular. The children cultivate plant and harvest their own crops. The eager children benefit from knowing it takes hard work, patience and discipline and also they gain respect for nature, the community and each other. All these proud children have a chance to earning recognition at the Four Town Fair. The children also at the end of summer workshop season have a terrific party to celebrate their garden achievements. The children all have fun.

Henry and Amalita have spent countless hours making sure that the future of the garden is secure. That the efforts of the volunteers continue to deliver thousands of pounds of fresh produce to the area food relief agencies. If you have not had a chance to volunteer it is something you should do for yourself and the community. After all children really know what fun is !



Ted Lipkin

[Ted Lipkin]

Sunny Patch Kids’ learn to garden
BY TOM PHELAN ReminderNews
For the third year in a row, Enfield youngsters will be able to work and learn about gardening in the Sunny Patch at the Rotary Garden behind the Enfield Senior Center. The classes began on June 28 and finish on Aug. 30.
.Sunny Patch was an outgrowth of the Rotary Club Common Grounds Garden project, according to program mentor Amalita Grimes.“This [Common Ground] started out for me as just a volunteer project for the UConn Master Gardener course,” she said. The UConn program requires that each person qualifying as a master gardener conduct a volunteer project that benefits the community. All the produce grown at Common Grounds and Sunny Patch is donated to the Enfield Food Shelf and Loaves and Fishes Kitchen.
Grimes has found that children just don’t think about where their food comes from, nor do they know they can actually grow it themselves.“Not everybody knows where things come from. Not everybody knows what is the root and what is the top,” she said.
After two years of educating kids at Sunny Patch, Grimes said families are finding that it changes things at home.“They come to me and say:‘It changed my life. We now grow vegetables in our backyard,’” she said. Parents are often amazed at the impact on their children. Grimes has heard the amazement in parents’ voices, saying things like,“My kids eat vegetables they never would have touched before, because we helped grow them.”
The amount of effort children are willing to put into the garden has impressed the master gardener. When they started out, the plan was to work in the garden for only 15 minutes and then do crafts. Grimes expected the Sunny Patch Kids would lose interest and focus pretty quickly. But she found that before anyone realized it, they had been working in the garden more than a half hour and wouldn’t stop to move to the other activity . Now it’s the alternate activity that gets only 15 minutes.
“They inspire me,” said Grimes, relating a story about how relentless the children were when given the task of pulling weeds on the compost pile. They were told they just needed to spend 15 minutes on the task, but they refused to quit until the pile was weed-free .
Class runs from 10:30 a.m. to noon, but experience shows that many students stay later. There is a large contingent of students each week. As many as 45 gardening students have worked in the Sunny Patch garden at one time. Older children are asked to be ‘assistants’ for activities by younger children. Ten-, 11-and 12-year-olds are asked to be helpers. Grimes has no problems with the children , because they have lots of room and work on many different tasks. They learn, for example, that if they don’t pay attention and step on the tomato plants, they just won’t get any tomatoes.
At every class, the group teaches children about its main mission – raising food for the Enfield Food Shelf. In keeping with the garden’s concept, parents of the children are asked to contribute somehow in the Common Grounds garden.
Grimes is determined to use Common Grounds and Sunny Patch to bring the community together. She tries to find people with special interests and expertise to share their talents with the children .“My focus is to try and get folks from the community who know about these topics to come and teach it,” she said. Last year, a wetland scientist led a nature hike to discover the wetlands behind the Rotary Garden. This year, Grimes wants to incorporate similar lessons by other experts.
The theme for Sunny Patch this year centers on growing everything needed to make pizza.“We’ve already got tomatoes, basil, onion… and we’re going to grow soybeans to make the cheese,” Grimes said. She has a machine to make soymilk and believes they can make the jump from soymilk to soy-cheese .
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[Ted Lipkin]

Notices about the summer gardening program for kids were sent out through the school-community partnership program . This year, they got to more school children than last year. Children 5 and older may still register for the program on Saturday mornings at the Common Grounds Garden behind the Enfield Senior Center