University of Maine Cooperative Extension's hands-on Kids Can Grow program gets children excited about gardening. Kids learn and practice gardening in a series of five monthly sessions from April through August at the UMaine Extension York County demonstration gardens. They are mentored and inspired by a team of Master Gardener Volunteers. Successfully raising vegetables, flowers, and herbs builds self-esteem and starts children on a journey that can become a satisfying, lifelong hobby.

Kids Can Grow teaches children

• how to choose, plant, and grow nutritious vegetables, herbs, and beautiful flowers for their families;
• the basics of good nutrition and food safety; and
• how to build and plant a 3' x 5' raised bed garden at home, with materials, seedlings, and amended topsoil supplied by us.

Kids Can Grow has been inspiring young gardeners for more than 10 years!

UMaine Extension educators and Master Gardener Volunteers have been teaching children how to grow fresh produce and flowers in our York County demonstration gardens since 1999. All produce grown in our Kids Can Grow demonstration gardens is donated to the Plant-A-Row for the Hungry project. Children learn how to seed, thin, transplant, fertilize, weed, water, and harvest their own gardens. Kids also create garden crafts such as terracotta garden stones imprinted with plants, stones, etc., earth buddies (see photo below), and "web sites" (spider houses to attract beneficial insects).

Nutrition education is an important part of Kid's Can Grow.

Children learn about nutrition and food safety in our program. They cook "harvest pizzas" using produce from their own home gardens and work with a Culinary Arts Instructor from York County Community College to learn how to work safely in the kitchen while making their pizzas.

Kids Can Grow is also a specialty 4-H Club.

Each Kids Can Grow participant is enrolled as an independent 4-H member so they can display their garden produce, posters about what they have learned, their garden craft items, and samples of preserved foods such as tomato sauce at a local county agricultural fair.

The cost of Kids Can Grow is only $20 per child, thanks in part to generous support from sponsors like the Master Gardener Association of York County and grants from the Maine Community Foundation in Oxford and Knox Counties.

For more information about the program or how to enroll your child, contact Frank Wertheim, Extension Educator, UMaine Extension York County Office, 21 Bradeen Street, Suite 302, Springvale, ME 04083, 207-324-2814 or frankw@umext.maine.edu.