I'm home during the day with my daughter, Sedra, who's 5 years old. We plan to homeschool, so I'm always on the lookout for fun stuff we can do together while learning. On a Monday in June I spotted a flyer at the library about Hockings Heritage Garden. The program started the next day, so we went. I was expecting it to be another spoon-fed storytime with some hands-on activities. What we found when we got there went well beyond my expectations. We found a community of gardeners in action, and were invited to be a part of it. I introduced my daughter and myself, then went back to the car to get my gardening gloves.

We spent most of the afternoon cultivating the soil (i.e. pulling weeds). The kids stood in line to plant cabbage, greens, and marigolds. Then they took turn watering the plants.

Hockings Heritage Garden sits on a plain fenced-in lot in the middle of an ordinary residential block with houses on either side. They don't even have water, so in order to irrigate they pay the summer water bills for their neighbor lady, and access her water.

The gardeners provide a hose and drape it over the fence to water the thirsty gardens. I look at that as a prime example of the "community" aspect of community gardening. I love that they didn't get the permit to dig the hole to bury the pipe to begin the paper chase to get the water to use in the garden. They just asked the neighbor if they could use her water, and she said OK. As a mom, I really appreciate this mentality, because when adults use common sense, children learn common sense.

My goal as a parent is for my daughter to grow up with confidence, aware of her own value. I want her to experience things herself. By being involved in community gardening, she is learning that she indeed can make positive changes to the world around her. I believe the best way, perhaps the only way, for a child to feel useful is to be involved in activities like this where they're contributing their time and energy towards a worthwhile goal.

It's an adult-centered world we're living in, and it's been a struggle for me to find ways that my daughter and I can volunteer together. So I'm so thankful for the opportunity for she and I to work side-by-side in the garden, soaking in the sun and making a difference in our community in a beautiful way.

Even now, I can picture my mother on her knees in her garden. I would watch her through the screen on our back door and simply wonder to myself, why would she want to grow that stuff when she could just buy it all from the grocery store?

I, also, can picture my grandmother, my mother’s mother, in her backyard, weeding her tomatoes, carefully working around the stems and touching the earth as though it was the most precious thing in the world. I don’t recall ever working alongside of either one of them, or even wanting to. It was their time to claim something I had not yet learned to appreciate or value. I was able to understand, as I watched them all of those summer and autumn days, that it was about more than the vegetables and fruit they would harvest. There was something peace-filled and even spiritual going on between their hands and the earth. I would have to grow up, leave my hometown of Pittsburgh, in the hills of Pennsylvania, and find myself an adult in Milwaukee, with children of my own, before I could claim my gardening heritage, and soak in the joy and serenity of nurturing flowers and food and watching them grow.

The Hockings Heritage Garden has provided me with an opportunity to both, do something that I love doing and give back to the community at the same time.