A few months ago, as she was approaching retirement as Children's Librarian from our local school district, Donna March mentio

ned to me about maybe doing something during the summertime for the kids. She, along with Eleanor Ahern, has been a integral part of the success of our Growing Young Readers program which we do on the 2nd Saturday of every month. They tirelessly, and very creatively come up with a great reading selection and craft project for the kids each month. We are going on 5 years with this program, and every month brings some new faces, quite a few steady followers, and just plain fun.

So back to the beginning of this. Donna asked me if I thought we would have interest from the parents for a weekly offering during the summer. We threw around some ideas, and came up with Camp Garden. Appealing to the same age group as our Saturday group, we would focus on bugs, gardening, birds etc and maybe give the Mom's some time together too.

The first week I think we had 5 or 6 kids. We hired a y

oung teenage assistant, a very helpful Madison Brown, and off we went. Of course I was thrilled because my daughter and grandson were still here visiting for the first 2 camps. The second week we had 12 children assisting Michelle with the planting of flowers in the River Garden.

We are now coming up on week 4 this next Tuesday. The group grew to 32! last week and we have covered Bees & Butterflies, dug up garlic, planted Bee Balm and toured the nursery looking for all the flowers that butterflies love. This next week brings on the spiders and bugs, o

h boy!

And just in case you can't tell..............we are having just as much fun as the kids. Hope to see you at Camp Garden soon, Susan