Staff Photo by Dan Henry Rebecca Dalrymple, the YMCA garden coordinator, explains how flowers become vegetables on an eggplant to five-year-olds at the downtown Chattanooga YMCA on Wednesday.
Five-year-old Kaleb Wiley crouches, eye-level with green plants sprouting from the ground.
"Hey y'all, come here. Look," he says, summoning his friends as he reaches out to touch a yellow flower on the end of a green zucchini plant.
On a hot Wednesday afternoon, Kaleb and friends are working at the YMCA preschool garden downtown, one of nine community gardens recognized by the Chattanooga-Hamilton County's Step One initiative.
The garden is part of the YMCA's Activate America national initiative to eliminate obesity, said Bill Rush, chairman of the Metropolitan Chattanooga YMCA Activate America campaign and director of the North Georgia YMCA.
Teaching young people to grow and eat healthy food is one way to prevent obesity in youths, he said. To drive home that message, the students today will cook and eat vegetables harvested from the garden, he said.
Sweat dampened Rebecca Dalrymple's face as she instructed the preschoolers on what tomatoes were ready for picking.
"Don't pick the yellow or green ones," she said.
Ms. Dalrymple, the YMCA's garden coordinator, said the goals for the garden are to teach children that it's possible to grow their own vegetables and to teach the community about the benefits of local food production. Having a garden also is more nutritious and economical than buying produce from some stores, she said.
"A lot of children don't even know where their food comes from," she said. "They think you just buy it out of the store or it comes from McDonald's."
The average produce from the store travels about 1,500 miles before it reaches a consumer, and it loses some of its nutritional value, Ms. Dalrymple said.
Because gas and other energy must be used to grow and transport the produce, it also has a bigger carbon footprint on the environment than if it were grown locally, she said.
Middle and high school students in the YMCA's Community Action Project -- or YCAP -- helped Ms. Dalrymple plant the vegetables. Of the 15 students who planted the garden, only a couple could identify a tomato plant when they saw it, she said.
The students planted green zucchini, green peppers, white onions, purple eggplants and red tomatoes.
On Wednesday, YCAP participant Brian Brewer was putting newspaper around the plants so they could retain moisture better. Planting a garden can help students learn lessons beyond nutrition, he said.
"It teaches traits to use every day, like determination. Keep at it, and don't give up," Mr. Brewer said.
STEP ONE AND ACTIVATE AMERICA
* Step ONE, which stands for Optimize with Nutrition and Exercise, is a Chattanooga-Hamilton County government-supported program initiated in 2004 to improve the health habits of Hamilton County residents. For more information, go to www.hcstep1.org.
* Activate America is an initiative led by the YMCA of the USA to improve the health of Americans by promoting healthy lifestyle changes. For more information, go to www.ymca.net/activateamerica.
