At Aldridge Botanical Gardens in Hoover, Alabama, 14 Junior Master Gardeners have an important job to do! The JMG Groovy Gardeners are responsible for keeping the field trip garden looking good for the 2,600 elementary school children who come for field trips every year! At their meetings on the 2nd Saturday of every month, 12 months a year, the JMG kids come to the garden to learn about soil, compost, insects, and how to grow healthy vegetables, fragrant herbs, and beautiful flowers. Part of every meeting is spent pulling weeds and making the garden look neat so visitors will have a safe, attractive and interesting place to learn about plants and soil. The Groovy Gardeners provide a real service for Aldridge Gardens and their reward is more than feeling good about doing something useful – when they go home after meetings – every month of the year - they always carry a bag of fresh picked produce, herbs and flowers!

The 14 girls and boys in the JMG Groovy Gardeners range in age from 7 to 14 years. Some of them have been gardening since the first JMG class two years ago and some have just joined the group. We try to keep the number of kids at 10, but it has gone as high as 17! The range of ages and experience is nice because older kids can help the younger, and more experienced kids can help the newer ones. These young organic gardeners plant by the square foot method which makes it easy to design a garden plan and share space with a friend. Four or five moms, dads, or grandparents usually join the kids at monthly meetings because they want to learn more about gardening. Some report that they have built raised beds at home so the children have a place to practice what they do at their meetings. There are also reports about how the veggies that go home are cooked. Sometimes they come back to the garden in the form of a gift to share such as zucchini bread! The kids are also avid plant swappers and have a great time trading plants that “volunteer” in or around their raised beds.

The Groovy Gardeners do community service as a part of every meeting. Their job is to keep the area with their raised beds looking neat and attractive because they are part of the Field Trip Garden. More than 2,600 children come through the Garden every year for lessons that focus on soils, habitats, plant propagation, trees and garden math. When they walk up the path and enter this site you can always hear little gasps of amazement and whispers of “It’s so beautiful.” The Junior Master Gardeners have not only planted seeds to grow plants, they have “planted seeds” to grow future gardeners!