Brownies get chance to use their green thumbs

Carl Lytle historically grows a large vegetable garden.

He plants and his wife, Jean, cans the results. They make quite a tag team.

This year, however, the Des Plaines couple didn't have time so Teresa Curtin, the Lytles' daughter, suggested she might have the perfect use for the garden.

Her daughter's Brownie troop was looking for a service project. And as she'd always wanted to participate in Plant a Row for the Hungry herself, growing vegetables for those in need seemed like the perfect marriage of interests.

Since last September, the troop based at Forest Elementary School in Mount Prospect has talked about the project and invited experts out to give them advice on the best planting methods.

When the soil warmed up this spring in Lytle's garden, Curtin took the troop over and the girls went to work, planting seeds given them by master gardeners with the University of Illinois Extension service.

They put in tomatoes, peppers, two kinds of squash, leaf lettuce, loads of beans and some radishes that - at last look - weren't faring particularly well. Everything else, though, is growing by leaps and bounds.

The girls, who'll attend third grade in the fall, generally work in Lytle's back yard at least once a week, and they've been pretty surprised at how large the plants that started as tiny seeds have grown, Curtin said.

Everything the troop grows will go to the Self-Help Food Pantry in Des Plaines as part of the program that urges gardeners to plant a little extra in their garden, or harvest any surplus, and donate it to participating food pantries and soup kitchens. The program, sponsored locally by the Daily Herald and Northern Illinois Food Bank, is promoted nationally by the Garden Writers Association.

Curtin said the girls didn't set a goal for how many pounds they'd like to donate this year, saying that this is more of a learning year for subsequent seasons. Based on how things are going so far, though, it should be a bumper crop, Curtin said.