Gardening grows cheerful Girl Scouts

For Melanie Cohodes, 12, working in a garden is a mood enhancer.

"It just chases all the bad feelings away," the Girl Scout from Arlington Heights said. "You feel grumpy at the beginning, but you go and work there and you get a good feeling when you say, 'Look at all this stuff I did.'"

Cohodes is one of 14 Thomas Middle School girls in a Girl Scout troop who have taken on a summer project of tending to a garden. They have been donating the vegetables as part of the Daily Herald Giving Garden program, which encourages gardeners to give fresh fruit and vegetables to food pantries.

Thelma Talamantes, who oversees the donations at the drop-off site operated by Wheeling Township, expects to see a total of about 300 pounds from the group by the end of the season. The scouts have already brought that site more than any group or individual this year.

"This is going to be a great life experience for them," said Talamantes. "They are learning to grow, to plant, to harvest and to give."

The girls, their troop leaders and their parents have been working all summer at a 25-by-30-foot garden at Frontier Park in Arlington Heights.

The troop planted tomatoes, green peppers, cucumbers, green and yellow beans, zucchini and acorn squash. They also planted sunflowers and zinnias "to make the garden pretty," said Mari Malzahn, one of the troop's assistant leaders. They even personalized the garden with a scarecrow they built themselves.

"They've learned to appreciate getting dirty," she said. "There's some hard work involved, and they've stepped up and done it."

Malzahn said this type of project embodies the spirit of Girl Scouts - helping out the community.

"It's unfair that homeless people don't get as much good food from vegetables as we do because they don't really have the opportunities to grow them or buy them," said Cohodes. "It's really neat, because an hour or two every day can help people get the food and nutrition they need in their daily lives."

Depending on the weather, that hour or two a day is all it takes to care for the garden, and the work is split up among the girls. Two girls and their families are responsible for the garden tasks each week: watering, pulling weeds, getting rid of bugs and harvesting the vegetables.

"They learn if they neglect the garden, they won't get the harvest," said Malzahn, who has been involved with gardening her whole life.

Cohodes offers a few pieces of advice to potential vegetable growers and donors:

• Don't contaminate vegetables by using too many pesticides.

• Check with the food pantry to see what kinds of vegetables are needed.

• Grow more than one of each plant because not every plant will survive.

And gardening is definitely worth the trouble, said this Girl Scout.

"It's a really great feeling when you plant a tiny little seed and a few weeks later you have this huge sunflower or tomato plant," she said.

"This little seed may not have had a chance to sprout in the wild, and you're giving it a chance at life to sprout and bloom."