Desert Senita Community Health Center Garden Programs

Description

Desert Senita Community Health Center's Garden Programs promote home-grown health from the ground up. We focus on gardening as a tool for nutrition and wellness education as part of the health center's preventive care plan. Our target populations include children, youth, seniors, people with disabilities, and the extended families so important in our community. We hope to improve food security for these target populations, and include hunger awareness and food-assistance support in our garden programming.

When possible, we demonstrate culturally-appropriate, seasonal crops appropriate for use in small, intensive gardening settings, then teach participants how to plan and prepare a garden for year-round food production. We provide seed and plant starts to program participants when possible, and teach seed-saving and plant propagation skills. We also plan to include cooking and food-preservation instruction to enable participants to use what they grow.