Last summer, we had garden education workshops with participants from the
Spartan Keyes Neighborhood Action Center and from the organization Project
Hope.

We had a total of 69 participants, and held six in-person workshops. Some of
the workshops were at Kelley park, and a few of them were at the Mckinley
elementary school garden. All of the participants had the opportunity to harvest
some vegetables, and were provided with gardening kits to start their own
gardens.

We decided to embrace one of the tenants of environmental education by
making our kits and workshops culturally relevant and themed around the
traditional Latin American dish: Pico de gallo. The kits consisted of a large
pot, a tomato plant, a hot pepper plant, an onion plant and a cilantro plant.

In the first workshop participants learned about each plant, and built their
kits. In the second workshop we taught participants all about the origins of
pico de gallo and where each plant comes from and how the meal connects
to Latin American culture and languages. And in the final lesson, participants
learned about the benefit of having native flowers around their garden and
were also able to talk about how their kits did, and we were able to make pico
de gallo from the food harvested from some of their kits!