Children's Pizza Garden

For the first time, Green Venture’s Community Garden program worked with the Community Access to Child Health (CATCH) to plant, grow and harvest a Children’s Pizza Garden.

Every Wednesday, a group of parents and kids (age 2-5) from the neighborhood CATCH program spend an hour in the garden exploring, doing crafts, learning about the vegetable garden and getting their hands dirty plantings seeds, pulling weeds and discovering insects.

Together with the community garden coordinator, parents and kids decided what they wanted to plant in their pizza garden:
Sweet Bell Peppers
Red Onions
Basil
Tomatoes
Watermelon
Pumpkins
Sunflowers
String Beans

To make sure the garden would have enough time to grow, the community garden coordinator purchased most of the plants as seedlings from two independent grocers on James Street North (they have great prices and selection). There were two exceptions: pumpkins that were planted directly into the soil by the kids and their parents and beans that were started in the window of the CATCH office and then transplanted into the community garden.

The biggest challenges of the Children’s Pizza Garden were:

Location/Sunlight – The children’s area is a 30 square foot plot of garden space divided into five smaller triangular spaces. Although this provided plenty of space to grow, the area only ever received partial sunlight. Most of the plants grew slowly and produced small fruit. The beans and pumpkins planted in other areas of the community garden, received more light therefore producing a greater yield.

Participation – Although there was a hand full of dedicated parents and kids who visited the garden nearly every week, we were never quite sure how many gardeners to expect Wednesday morning. This made it difficult at times to plan and execute garden chores and activities. With a little help from Green Venture summer students and other regular community gardeners, the children’s garden received more then enough love to keep it growing.

In September, the kids and their parents enjoyed two delicious large pizza’s made from fresh ingredients from the Children’s Pizza Garden and other areas of the community garden: tomatoes, basil, oregano, broccoli and hot chili peppers.

The only things purchased from the neighborhood independent grocery were two balls of pizza dough, mozzarella cheese, a sweet green bell pepper, onions and garlic. CATCH staff contributed fresh pizza sauce they had cooked at home using ingredients from the community garden.

With a little direction from the community garden coordinator, parents worked together in the CATCH kitchen to prepare two large pizzas that was shared with 15 kids and over 8 adults (parents and CATCH staff).

Between chopping and baking, the adults whipped up a large pot of pizza sauce for parents to take home. This was a great way to get all the parents involved, even those who were not part of the cooking.

The kids can’t wait to see their pumpkins grow just in time for Halloween. The pumpkins will be used for carving, baking and making snacks (toasted squash seeds are a delicious treat).