Support young gardeners, Saturday at Morristown’s Collinsville Child Care Center

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(Ed. note: Betsy Harvin is a volunteer at the Collinsville Child Care Center in Morristown. Kids are selling potted plants on Saturday–but these aren’t just any old potted plants!)

By Betsy Harvin

Kid-grown Brandywine tomatoes will be on sale Saturday at Morristown's Collinsville Child Care Center. Photo by Renaux, Wikimedia Commons.
Kid-grown Brandywine tomatoes will be on sale Saturday at Morristown's Collinsville Child Care Center. Photo by Renaux, Wikimedia Commons.

The five-year-olds and I have grown from seed delicious kale and heirloom Brandywine tomato starter plants.  We’ve worked like dogs! Scavenging seeds and fine rich organic soil from Genesis Farm in Blairstown, and old planters from my shed and rocks for the bottom of the planters in my back yard.

It’s a spare capacity play (use what’s on hand or what people have to share or donate), it’s a green play, of course, and it’s a “work for fun and make a little pocket change” play.

Your assignment, should you chose to accept it, is to wander over Saturday and buy a pot or two from the kids.  All plants are potted in containers big enough to hold the plant for the season.  Think your own sustenance, of course, but think gift as well.

Each child has dictated his or her version of how to grow and take care of the plant he or she will sell, and well, it may not be terribly detailed but it is a little charming.  Each plant will have a card attached with the five-year-old gardener’s commentary and signature.

It’s $10 a pot. That’s $5 to the five-year-old gardener, and $5 to Collinsville Day Care, which has lost its lease and has to find a new home by the end of the year.  Don’t blanch at the $5 to the five-year-old.  The sooner we get the message “hard work doing something you like in the great outdoors could lead to a little pocket change,” the better.

Look for signs for the rummage sale, and ask for the plants.


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