This is the second year Bayside Community Center in Linda Vista has provided Tiny Gardens to the community.
“We spent a lot of time shoveling dirt into these felt bags," said Hope Shaw, a freshman at High Tech High in Clairemont. Like Shaw, other students from the high school shovel soil into bags. But for Shaw and a group of her fellow students, it was all totally worth it.
“ (We want) to help people who are without access to healthy food because it is a basic human need, a basic human right and no one should be without it," she said.
“Hello, hold on — what color bag do you want?" asked County Board of Supervisors chair Nathan Fletcher as he helped load cars at the event.
Fletcher originally partnered with Bayside last year as a way to get food — and the means to grow it — to people during the pandemic.
“If you can locally grow, you’re gonna get access to fresh produce and vegetables, you’re also gonna have a positive environmental impact by not trucking things across the country and across the world — it’s not as hard as it seems," Fletcher said.
Along with the soil, everyone here gets a tomato and cilantro plant, a drip tray, tomato cage and watering can. And they’re provided instructions on how to make their garden grow. But the sum total of what folks are getting here is so much more than the parts.
“One of the moms here told me her kids would never eat vegetables until they grew them themselves, and now they eat them all the time and they tell all their friends about it," said Fletcher.
Tiny Gardens: a name that really only makes sense at the start, for these gardens will grow, and turn into something big, something fun, something that is life sustaining for people and the planet.
