|
News Florida PAL
Our Activities
Youth
Directors |
|
How Does Your Garden Grow? By Karen Fleming
Winter Haven Police Athletic League (PAL) kids had a chance to flex their green thumbs this spring. Working with the Winter Haven Cricket Club and city employees, the kids helped construct eight wooden boxes for raised beds filled with composted soil, flowers and herbs. The garden is right next door to the PAL center, in a vacant lot donated by the neighboring Florence Villa Community Center. The PAL kids and the disabled adults of Florence Villa will work together to maintain the garden. “The purpose of the garden is to build, maintain and harvest a garden that is a way for people to get to know their neighbors. When neighborhoods succeed, we all succeed,” Kay Boone, Winter Haven Neighborhood Outreach and Grant coordinator, told News Chief correspondent Brenda Eggert Brader in an article published on March 28, 2011.
Boone selected plants that could take full sun, such as tomatoes, collard greens, sweet corn, peppers, eggplant, broccoli, and chives, fennel and rosemary. A butterfly garden was planted for fun. A manual irrigation system was installed to make the maintenance easier. Community gardens are Mayor Jeff Potter’s initiative this year. “Each year I have an initiative,” he told Brader. “This year it is the community gardens. The city has some of the funds for the gardens in its budget, but it is done mostly with donations.” Do PAL kids like vegetables? Maybe not so much on their dinner plate, but when they’ve grown it themselves, they just might feel more ready to try that broccoli.
********** These pictures were taken at the Region 4 Community Service Event held in Lakeland, FL by the Lakeland PAL on June 26, 2010. The community event was to feed the homeless and PALS from Pinellas County, Lakeland, Ft Myers, Zephyrhills, Lake Wales, and Winter Haven attended and helped out at this event. We served more than 380 meals, not including seconds. The event was very successful and everyone had a great time.
|
