Elementary student’s giant cabbage snares $1,000 from Bonnie Plants
Posted on: January 25, 2019 | Written By: Everybody Gardens |
A Western Pennsylvania elementary student earned some cabbage for growing a giant (and we mean giant) cabbage.
Courtesy of Bonnie Plants
Lily Ries participated in the National Bonnie Plants Third Grade Cabbage Program and was randomly drawn as Pennsylvania’s winner.
Lily, now a fourth grader at Peebles Elementary in North Allegheny, earned a $1,000 savings bond in the drawing conducted by Pennsylvania’s Agriculture Department.
More than 31,000 students in Pennsylvania participated in the program, which gives more than one million third graders a chance to get gardening experience.
Bonnie Plants delivers ‘O.S. Cross’ cabbage plants, which can grow up to 50-pound heads, to schools that have signed up for the program. The plants start only a few inches high, so it’s up to the students to nurture them. Each school chooses its “best” cabbage that gets entered in the state-wide competition.
“The Bonnie Plants Cabbage Program is a wonderful way to engage children’s interest in agriculture, while teaching them not only the basics of gardening, but the importance of our food systems and growing our own,” Stan Cope, Bonnie Plants president said in a release. “This unique, innovative program exposes children to agriculture and demonstrates, through hands-on experience, where food comes from. The program also affords our youth with some valuable life lessons in nurture, nature, responsibility, self-confidence and accomplishment.”
Teachers interested in running the program at their school can find more details here.
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