Lauderdale Lakes Tutors Come To You

Residents of Lauderdale Lakes, in central Broward County, Florida, love getting their hands dirty. And their children do, too.

The community was clamoring for a community garden, and city officials listened. After all, there was no downside: nutritious produce, along with fresh air and outdoor activity, is a proven health booster. The Community Redevelopment Agency employed a planning tool called a “charrette,” a focused period of design, to get community input on how to launch the project, and in 2011, the garden opened with seventeen beds. Three years later, the garden had expanded to forty-seven plots. Families choose which vegetables and plants they want to grow, continually refining their selections based on their gardening successes. They share tips and chores with other families, and come together regularly for social events like cookouts and garden-to-plate cooking demonstrations.

Residents were so enthusiastic that they requested an area specifically for their children to learn about gardening. The CRA came through again, finding a blacktop lot elsewhere in the city that could be converted into a garden. The agency even arranged for a consultant to head up a multi-disciplinary project that involved local schools, businesses, and neighbors; the purpose of the project was to improve the garden through the use of art.

Schools within the Boyd Anderson School Zone use the children’s garden to teach kids to grow food from scratch—and to appreciate both the science of plant growth and the delicious “fruits” of their labor. The kids enjoy the hands-on education, eagerly performing weeding, watering, and harvesting duties. They have even learned to save some of the seeds from one growing season for planting the following season.

In fact, the whole community is benefitting. In early 2017, the nonprofit Lauderdale Lakes Community Garden Club, which oversees the gardens, donated thirty-one bags of produce, containing cabbage, kale, tomatoes, lettuce, and collard greens, to senior citizens who attend a daycare program.

The flourishing gardens and the community’s enthusiasm has not gone unnoticed. In 2016, the Broward County horticultural technician selected Lauderdale Lakes’ children’s garden as the recipient of educational materials from the Microbial Ecology section of the Ecological Society of America. The recognition came in the form of composting materials: a composting bin, giant thermometer, soil sieve, compost storage container, composting instructions, and children’s educational materials, such as word searches and coloring pages. The United States Department of Agriculture had suggested choosing a promising organization that would truly benefit from the assistance, and the Lauderdale Lakes children’s garden was deemed the most deserving. With much celebration and community pride, CRA officials and local master gardeners hosted a high-ranking official from the USDA on a tour of both the family and the children’s community gardens in August 2016.