STORY AND PHOTOS BY KAREN BOSSICK

The 22 pint-sized youngsters had hardly passed through the gate leading to the new greenhouse at the YMCA when Tira Scott began handing out “grown-up magnifying glasses.”

“Magic happens in this garden. And I have some real exciting things to show you!” she said.

But first, she added, they needed to agree to some ground rules.

“We respect the plants—don’t yank their leaves off. And if you see a spider and you’re scared of it, just back away. Don’t kill it because it could be a helpful spider,” she said.

Scott oversees the Wood River YMCA’s new garden program, which encompasses an outside patio bursting with flowers and veggies and Bonni’s Greenhouse, which honors the memory of Bonni Curran.

Scott wants to do more than show kids the mechanics of planting a seed and watching it grow. She wants to show them the entire process from seed to table. She wants to teach them how Native Americans used plants for healing. And she wants to instill the wonder of things like creation and life in her junior botanists.

That charge is apparent as she introduces them to mint plants, with which she plans to make sun tea.

 “I want to show you something amazing,” said Scott, who began studying botany while teaching preschool in Los Angeles as a way of reconnecting with the nature she loved growing up in McCall. “You can always identify mint because its stems have four sides—it’s like a little square stem.”

 There are many different kinds of mint—even chocolate mint, she told the children.

“All plants are living and I believe they can sense us. So, when we take food from a plant I want you to say, ‘Thank you, plant.’ ”

“Thank you, plant,” the children chorus as each pulled off a mint leaf.

The kids watched wide eyed as Scott dropped the mint leaves in a large glass jar and drizzled honey into it. Mission accomplished, she put the jar aside to brew. And she turned her attention to green sprouts coming up in a couple raised beds inside the greenhouse.

“These are your seeds,” she said, pointing out the carrot, radish and beet starts. “We’re growing food, my friends--in just one week. It makes my heart swell it’s so exciting.”

Scott and her assistant, Mac Harbaugh, showed the kids how to press indentations with their thumbs into the soil of an empty raised bed. Each then dropped a seed into that indentation, saying “I love you,” as they did.

“It’s like tucking them into bed,” said Harbaugh.

Next Scott encouraged the youngsters to water their seeds.

“We can water too much and drown seeds so just a little sprinkle,” she said.

Scott started the garden in February—months before the greenhouse would be finished—by teaching children to plant sugar snap peas in coconut husks that would decompose.

The garden, which she described as a “learning lab,” will be used by a variety of groups, including Y camps, Higher Ground and the Hunger Coalition. Scott would like to start a “spaghetti garden” teaching the youngsters to make homemade tomato sauce in a crock pot.

  She’d like to involve grandparents with the youngsters and maybe even do classes for senior populations, such as those with dementia who remember fondly working in their own gardens.

“I think this garden will be a showcase for good garden practices—there are a lot of frustrated gardeners here,” she said. “And gardening is a whole body experience—a way for parents to be engaged in creative activity while teaching their children skills and values.

The greenhouse will be used for nutrition and cooking classes, science classes and art classes during winter.

“Our goal is to make Blaine County the healthiest in Idaho,” Scott said. “I think we can transform our community over the years. I’m hoping that the kids we work with here will want to grow food for the rest of their lives. And I’m hoping I can introduce love to gardening and cooking, instead of mindlessness.”