PROSPERITY — Mid-Carolina Garden Basket will promote farming, marketing and cultural diversity among elementary, middle and high school students while making a home for itself in Prosperity within the 2018-2019 school year.
“Our goal is to teach elementary through high school children the fundamentals of farming and marketing so they have a better understanding of how the world works. They don’t really teach that in our curriculum today, mainly focusing on reading, writing and arithmetic,” said Phillip Anderson, president and founder.
Mid-Carolina Garden Basket also will hold educational classes. In the fall, classes will center around harvesting and marketing the crops, canning and preserving food.
“We’ll market the crops so we can get the community involved where they can come purchase produce from us,” said Anderson.
Winter classes will focus more on diversity and exploring different traditions and cultures. Spring will focus on planting seeds in gardens, which will roll into summer classes with maintaining the gardens and taking field trips to historic sites, farms and dairy sites.
In the programs, Anderson said that he would like to explore Native American and African American cultures, along with a wider range of cultures.
“Food will be a really good way to provide a common ground for people, because food is very important. We’re hoping to explore kids to different foods and ceremonies. I want it to be more cultural instead of religious. That’s important, but that’s unique to their own families. We’re an education center so we’ll focus more on the culture, food and music,” said Anderson.
An enrollment fee will be determined once the facility is up and running.
Mid-Carolina Garden Basket is a volunteer-based program and welcomes adults and those who are interested to become involved to help sell produce or help maintain the gardens.
Anderson said that there is also the possibility of learning how to cook recipes of different cultures with send home recipes and origins of dishes.
“That would be an excellent opportunity for them to expand on just them learning, but the whole family can learn from it,” said Anderson.
Art will also be part of the program’s curriculum.
“We’re going to have what we call a Unity Wall. In our area, deer are ferocious, so we’re going to have a barrier between our garden and the outside world because of the deer population. We decided to incorporate the Unity Wall where there will be segments depicting different cultures who are in our community,” said Anderson. “We’ll have different cultures depicted in our garden and we’ll have a history table where we’ll take newspaper articles from years ago of different events that have happened culturally in our town and make a collage where kids can look at it.”
For more information on Mid-Carolina Garden Basket, visit midcarolinagardenbasket.org or email midcarolinagardenbasket@gmail.com.