Sun and Rain Farm: A Farm For Our Children and Our Future.

This morning I had the privilege of explaining to a child where onions and tomatoes come from.  It amazed me to show him how the buds pictured at the right were going to form flowers and that those flowers would be pollinated by bees or other bugs and then would form fruit and that the fruit would form seeds and so on.  In the case of the onion, it would be a little different but still, the flower was a step in a process that will go on and on and on and on as long as we take care of it and it is not interrupted.

The Sun and Rain Farm was their idea and it is a good one.  Why don't we send seeds to other schools? We do not see many large scale, cohesive, educational opportunities for children in this area.  For the most part, we connect with interested parents but we need to address some hard truths in this area.  Taking a look at what we see, these initiatives are small and sporadic.  Anecdotally speaking, what we see is a pattern.  Right about now in early spring we see a lot of people who are really very excited about the garden.  They want to get outside and they want their children to get outside too.  They want their kids to learn about growing and gardening.

Then comes the long weekends and the spring breaks.  Then comes summer when school is out and the weather is hot.  When the children return in the fall, things are overgrown and by the time the garden is set to rights again, there is a chill in the air and on comes fall and winter.  Kids move on to higher grades and those enthusiastic parents are no longer concerned about the garden at the previous school.  Teachers do not have the time nor the funding to keep up these initiatives.

Our kids learned every part of what got that plant there.  They saw it go from seed to plant and are
now seeing flowers and fruit form.  Through Sun and Rain farm, they saw and worked with the compost effort that formed the soil those seeds were grown in.  The recycled the plastic containers from places all over and diverted it from the trash stream and used them to grow in. They did not have to wait for someone to go to the garden center to get plants and mulch. The goal is to see what it takes to build and maintain this project over time.

The formation of this project was relatively cheap, but what little was necessary for tools and the like came from recycling nearly 200 pounds of aluminum cans.  We are learning to be creative, solve problems, care for the community, and the environment.

The goal is sustainability and continuity. Sun and Rain Farm is taking off with that in mind,  .These kids want to help other kids do the same in reaching out to others and making a difference in their world.  Sun and Rain is about creating more farms and more gardens and teaching more kids.  It is that simple.

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