Ellie Greene lives next door to a preschool. Her home has precious little space for growing vegetables and other food-bearing plants. But she doesn’t complain about the dozens of rambunctious toddlers and children no older than four-years-old at the school or the parents coming by every morning and afternoon to drop them off, and she doesn’t allow the limitations of her yard to prevent her from doing what she enjoys.
Ellie has everything from corn-on-the-cob, watermelons, green beans, squash and peppers to tomatoes, strawberries, and eggplants growing in a very narrow strip of dirt only inches wide between her driveway and a tall cinder block wall, as well as cactus and other plants — more than most people grow in gardens ten times the size.
As for the preschool, Ellie invited the kids to walk over for a brief field trip Thursday (Aug. 26) to see, learn, and taste the fruits of her labor, which also included spotting and picking avocados from a tree and learning the difference between the black ones and green ones.
See for yourself the joy she brought to the children and the satisfaction she found for herself in making the most of what she has to create something so valuable to share with others in the video highlights below of the recent visit.
— By Scott Hettrick
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