“Who’s ready to see the flowers?” Early Childhood Education Leader Heaven Sepulveda asked a group of young students at the Cultural Resources Department Community Garden on the morning of April 14 in the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community.

The kids traveled to the garden via bus and learned about a variety of new happenings there.

Groups of students rotated through different activity stations, which included harvesting food and sitting in a tractor and pretending to drive it.

One of newest additions to the Community Garden is livestock. The scents and sounds of the chickens and pigs made them hard to miss.

Groups of kids took turns getting to know their new neighbors.

“Maybe [the kids] want to grow some chickens one day, or maybe they want to grow some pigs,” said Community Garden Coordinator Stetson Mendoza.

“So, we’re just a small example here at the Community Garden of what you can do at home.”

Mendoza said that the main goal of the visit was to get the young students to understand more about where their food comes from in a hands-on setting.

The kids got their hands dirty pulling carrots and eating them.

“We showed the students the difference in taste between the store and how [carrots] taste that much better here in the field,” said Mendoza.

To Community Garden Technician Jared Butler, sharing a sense of ownership of the land with the students was important.

“This is your garden here, and we want to encourage you to come out here and enrich your life,” Butler told the kids.

Community Garden Supervisor Jeffrey Wilson agrees with Butler’s sentiment.

“We want you to know that you come from a long line of people that farmed this area, that grew crops,” Wilson told the kids.

“Some of that knowledge has been lost over the years, but we want to try to bring it back to the Community.”