The North Carolina Cooperative Extension – Clay County Center recently completed a seven-week session of the Seed to Supper gardening program, a course designed to help individuals and families learn how to grow their own food at home.

Seed to Supper is a beginning gardening program that focuses on simple, practical skills for starting and maintaining a vegetable garden. Over the course of the series, participants learned the fundamentals of gardening, including how to plan a garden space, prepare soil, plant vegetables properly, and manage common garden pests and diseases. The program also covered basic maintenance practices such as watering, fertilizing, and harvesting vegetables throughout the growing season.

The goal of the program is to help participants gain the confidence and knowledge needed to successfully grow fresh produce at home. By learning these skills, participants can supplement their household food supply while also gaining a better understanding of how food is grown.

Through a Food Security Mini-Grant, the program was also able to provide each participant with supplies to begin their own small garden. Participants received a 5-gallon grow bag, potting soil, and vegetable seeds, allowing them to immediately put their new knowledge into practice and begin growing vegetables at home.

Programs like Seed to Supper play an important role in improving local food access and food security by helping community members develop the skills needed to grow their own food.