Yesterday's Community Garden Coalition Class

I am part of the Texarkana Community Garden Coalition. We have several public gardens in Texarkana, available for the general public. You want a tomato, come get a tomato. 

Once a month, we find a willing crazy volunteer among us to put on a free class for the public. Last month, as we were lamenting the lack of help we were getting in planting our biggest garden, I came up with this wild idea: why not put on a Container Gardening class. It would include a quick presentation about the what, when, and where of Container Gardening and then, we'd just Tom Sawyer our audience to our empty garden and allow anyone who came to our class the opportunity to plant something themselves. I sold the idea as a "practical, hand's on approach." 

Now then, the end result is that we have a planted garden and a lot of excited folks learned the basics of putting seeds in the ground. The feedback I got from the public was positive. There are now several more folks around town who want to play with plants. And I have to tell you, it was a blast to watch the lightbulb go off over their heads as they figured out how to correctly put a tomato plant into the soil, how to plant carrot seeds and even how to transplant wheat grass. 

As a side note, there was an actual presentation to this. I was the presenter. 

My presentation had two hiccups: 

1) The head of the Bowie County Master Gardeners showed up to the class. I opted to introduce him and then turned him being there into a joke: "If I tell you the wrong information, it's because I didn't pay enough attention on the day Bill was teaching me." By the way, Bill is a cornucopia of knowledge (and he said I did great). 

2) I have a walking boot on my foot. I've been so distracted, I forgot about the presentation until this past Monday. But more to the point, standing for any length of time is very painful and I paid for it the rest of the day. 

Polly, my driver, took a few photos. That lady in the brown saw the advertisement for the class on our Facebook page. She said she wanted to learn to plant a garden--something on her bucket list. This woman asked me a few questions, took a bit of one-on-one instruction and then went like an Energizer Bunny, planting everything she possibly could. I never caught her name, but I watched the gardening bug hit her right about the time this picture was taken. When she was leaving, I hobbled over and handed her a collard greens seed packet. It was like handing her gold bullion--she now realized she could feed herself.