Children attending the Boys & Girls Club of Watertown are increasingly interested in learning to garden.

To help ensure that every interested child gets a chance to get their hands in the soil and watch their favorite veggies sprout, the Master Gardeners have provided the club with two additional raised garden beds.

The Master Gardeners have been helping youth at the Boys & Girls Club learn to cultivate fruits, veggies, herbs and flowers for several years. Gerry Likness has been a Master Gardener volunteer for six of those years. She has played an active role in obtaining the grants needed to build the planting boxes so more children would have an opportunity to learn the love of gardening.

“The kids always show great enthusiasm,” said Likness. “More kids want to garden than there is room for.”

There are 30 youth from first to sixth grade who signed up to take the gardening program. The program is so full that there is a waiting list, and the children have to take turns on who gets to plant, weed and harvest.

Gardening has been a favorite activity at the Boys & Girls Club for more than a decade, and some of the original raised beds are so old they are turning into compost. This was another reason the new boxes needed to be built this year.

With the $1,500 Earl Dailey Memorial Grant from South Dakota State University, the Master Gardeners purchased the supplies needed to build the 4-by-8-foot raised beds. Students learning the building trade at Lake Area Technical College donated their time in constructing and delivering the boxes to the Boys & Girls Club.

The Master Gardener volunteers donated the paint for the boxes, and the children at the club primed and painted their boxes. Sioux Valley Greenhouse and Landscaping donated the soil, fabric liner and starter plants that went into these boxes.

A $250 grant from Thrivent was used to purchase other gardening necessities, including shears, seeds and watering cans.

The Boys & Girls Club children meet every spring to decide what they want to plant. It's a learning opportunity as not every plant is suitable for container gardening, as they discovered when wanting to grow pumpkins.

But regardless of the failures every gardener encounters, no matter their green thumb and expertise, the children are eager to learn.

“The children are so excited when the Master Gardeners stop over. The kids are at the door with their faces pressed to the glass, excited to see what their garden boxes are doing,” Likness said.

The garden boxes teach students that herbs like dill are responsible for making pickles taste so great and that the mint taste of toothpaste was once a green leafy plant. But one of the most important skills that the kids learn with planting boxes is the ability to work with others.

“For every one of those lives we touched, we have planted seeds of friendship,” said Likness. “They learned to get along with the other kids in the club and to work with the Master Gardeners.”