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Learning, living, growing

by Bethany Blitz
| July 27, 2016 9:00 PM

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<p>Christy Johnson, a nutrition advisor with Eat Smart Idaho, helps Damon Rosenau, center, and Eric Thomas, right, of The Boys and Girls Club to make a garden-fresh zucchini noodle salad.</p>

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<p>Alivia Byers, with The Boys and Girls Club of Post Falls gets carrot seeds at the Community Roots Gathering Garden to take home and grow. The Boys and Girls Club took a trip to the garden to learn about nutrition and eating healthy meals.</p>

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<p>Alivia Byers, 14, helps paint the fence of the Children’s Garden within the Community Roots Gathering Garden with The Boys and Girls Club of Post Falls. The club joined nutrition advisors with Eat Smart Idaho to learn about eating healthy, balanced meals.</p>

Kids stormed the bag of dirt, eager to fill their cups. Once the cups were full, the kids made small holes in the dirt by inserting their pinky finger deep enough to make an inch-deep depression. Then came the seeds. Each cup received a pinch of carrot seeds, which were then covered.

The young teens could take home their new carrot plants and watch them grow. Learning about how to plant and grow food is a useful skill and can help people understand how food is produced and consumed.

Tuesday, a group from The Boys and Girls Club visited the Community Roots Gathering Garden to learn about gardening and healthy eating.

Eat Smart Idaho, an extension program of the University of Idaho, gives classes and demonstrations to underprivileged families and communities about nutrition, gardening and environmental stewardship.

“Our goal is to empower kids who might not otherwise get this education on how to eat well and what to do with the food that’s growing and how to grow the food,” said Anissa Duwaik, an Eat Smart Idaho community nutritional adviser.

This summer, Eat Smart Idaho has been collaborating with the Kootenai Environmental Alliance to bring kids to the Community Roots Gathering Garden on the NIC campus. There, kids and anyone else who wants to come can learn about gardening, composting, the nutritional benefits of various plants and more.

So far, Eat Smart Idaho has brought in two groups of kids. It hopes the program will run earlier in the summer next year so kids can be more involved in planting and weeding to better understand the food-growing process.

“We’ve never been to the Gathering Garden before, but we have worked with [Eat Smart Idaho], learning about food, what to eat and how to make food,” said Chentelle Nelson, a youth development professional with The Boys and Girls Club. “But being out here, in the garden, making fresh food that’s just been picked, I think it’s super valuable for [the kids] to be outside.”

The Boys and Girls Club not only learned from a presentation about nutrition and took home their own carrot plants, they also helped paint the children’s garden fence and made a zucchini noodle salad with ingredients picked fresh from the garden that morning.

“I think it’s cool, just knowing what you’re eating, so you’re not just throwing something in your mouth and not knowing what it is,” said Alivia Byers, a 14-year-old with The Boys and Girls Club. “I don’t enjoy not knowing what I’m eating; if it’s something I don’t know, I want to know what it is and where it came from. This is cool.”

Christy Johnson, a nutrition adviser with Eat Smart Idaho, has been working with kids from The Boys and Girls Club all summer. She said it’s important to teach kids to make healthy choices when they’re young so they continue to make healthy choices when they’re older.

Johnson said kids really benefit from seeing the process in which food is grown and prepared.

“I think it’s important, them getting to see the food change as they’ve gotten to plant it to when they harvest it into the fall,” she said. “It’s really cool for them to get to see the process of where their food comes from, not just from the grocery store, but that it’s actually grown and how it’s grown.”

Eat Smart Idaho will be continuing its summer program at the Community Roots Gathering Garden every Tuesday through August. Parents interested in bringing their kids to a Children’s Gardening Day can arrange it with Anissa Duwaik, at anissaduwaik@gmail.com.