The Pinnacle of Gardening Club

              At the beginning of this semester we started the gardening after school activity and the recruiting of a sponsor and of more members to get the club on its way to be formalized. At the beginning of August, the first change was the after school gardening activity. Tuesday the 18 was going to be our first gardening afterschool activity. Ceppi and I were expecting very few or no kids to show up for the activity. It was 3:25 and we patiently worked on the garden waiting for the kids to show up. 5 minutes later still nobody had shown up. Now our patience was replaced by frustration since the afterschool was supposed to have started and we had no kids showing up. Finally at 3:35 our first gardening after school member showed up, it was a middle school girl.

              Right after, a few more middle school girls showed up and by the end of the activity we had 4 middle school girls working on the garden. Even though not a great number, it had exceeded my expectations and I was definitely proud of that. Now that we had some interested people, we had to make sure I could maintain them interested by teaching them some stuff. The first class of gardening started with a quick tour of the garden, telling the girls what we had planted in each row and some basic information about the plants. Amazingly, the first day we had cherry tomatoes to harvest and this was a great first impression of what the gardening club was all about. The girls immediately had the chance to see what an organically grown and just harvested tomato tastes like.

              The following days, we worked on starting the Gardening Club. We got Mr. Nicholson to be our sponsor and held a meeting the following week. People quickly showed up but this was no surprise since they had already shown interest long before. Jorge Lau, Andre Tostes and Alexandra Mirella were the first to show up.

              By now, I had no doubt that this club was going to have an impact on the Roosevelt community. People were willing to help expand this gardening club by involving more people in the activities and helping others too. Since the first harvest, we gave some of our crops to the kiosk and to the middle school kids. Everybody was willing to help and gardening, an apparently ignored activity, was now flourishing in the community just as much as other activities which had been for much more time.

             Now, when I thought I was through with all the hard work of starting the club and the afterschool activity, I had more work than ever before. Making the gardening club keep on working with so many people involved required much more organization and dedication than starting the club. But now that Jose Manuel and I were presented with the biggest challenge, we didn’t even doubt about whether it was a smart investment. We were sure of what we were doing and we would continue on with the project, there was only more to gain.