Helping hands turn a garden green — and other colors, too

Every year from late April to early September, a group of middle school and high school students tend the Ojos y Manos: Eyes and Hands agricultural terraces at the Santa Fe Botanical Garden.

With the support of our head gardener and youth gardener program coordinator and alongside botanical garden volunteers, five youth garden interns participate two afternoons a week learning to cultivate food.

Two symmetrical mounds of grass and stacked flagstone welcome visitors, bringing into focus the stage used for community events throughout the year.

The agricultural terraces encircle visitors with three tiers full of plant life on either side of the stage.

Since late spring, our interns have cultivated a number of different crops, and currently visitors can enjoy several varieties of peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, mustard, squash, melon, wild flowers and herbs. Visitors can also see our beautiful array of cilantro, parsley, and basil. Here are some of the plants you might encounter:

♦ The tomatoes are just starting to blush from green to red. X The okra plants are going to seed, providing an opportunity for seed collecting.

♦ Pollinating insects flutter around as they enjoy the mustard flowers. Scarlet red runner beans are in full bloom with their fiery red flowers.

♦ Sweet peas provide a humble harvest weekly as carrots hug one another beneath feathery tops.

♦ Beet greens and rainbow chard reveal their colorful veins as onions and leeks slowly poke through the soil.

♦ Volunteer-made cages await up-and-coming cucumber vines to amass.

As interns tend to the garden, they learn to identify plant growth patterns and characteristics of edible plant families. They witness seasonal changes in the crop life cycle and cultivate curiosity for the garden’s ecosystem with its surrounding wildlife.

The arrival of an eclipse of hawk moths has sparked inquiry into the contributing environmental conditions and the current explosion of these pollinators. The hummingbird hawk moth, so named for its physical resemblance to the bird in size and shape, is particularly drawn to the garden’s fragrant lavender, rose, and Mojave sage flowers.

Twice a week the produce is transported to Kitchen Angels, a local nonprofit focusing on preparing meals for older, homebound community members. Recently 30 pounds of sour cherries were harvested from the botanical garden’s orchard by our youth gardeners. Volunteers carefully washed and pitted each cherry before they were processed into a sour cherry glaze for a pork chop dinner delivered to our community of homebound elders.