CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) — This summer, children at the Boys & Girls Club of Orange are once again growing food in the club’s educational garden, which has been at the club for more than a decade.

But after it sat unused last summer and January’s winter storm caused significant damage to the garden, the Rapidan River Master Gardners stepped in to help ensure the kids would still be able to use their garden.

“They’ve been a great help,” Boys & Girls Club of Orange Unit Director Teddra Hepburn said of the Master Gardners. “Because we started out with nothing.”

Before the snowstorm, the existing wooden raised bed frames had already deteriorated, but the damage from the snow and ice left two of the four beds unsalvageable, and it looked as though the garden as a whole would be unusable this summer.

Needing help, the club reached out to the Rapidan River Master Gardners. The Master Gardner program is a statewide program run out of Virginia Tech, providing volunteers with graduate-level training so they can provide their communities with information about botany and plants.

The Rapidan River Gardners serve Orange, Madison and Green County as well as Culpeper.

After hearing about the Boys & Girls’ Club predicament and visiting their garden, the Master Gardners began two projects: a short-term project to let the kids use the garden this summer with temporary plant containers and a long-term project, for which the Master Gardners have applied for a grant to buy galvanized tubs.

“That way they will have a garden forever,” Project Liaison Rose Noxon told Cville Right Now. “Those tubs aren’t going to go anywhere. Hopefully, the kids grow up and come back and volunteer at Boys & Girls Club and they’re still going to use those galvanized tubs.”

In addition, the Master Gardners have also committed to bringing an educational program to the club, reflecting the Master Gardners’ commitment to educating the public on botany.

“We want the kids to know how to grow their own food,” Noxon said. “The Boys & Girls Club is a great place for that because they grow the good, like tomatoes and basil and whatever, and then they take it in and have a cooking class. So that, to me, shows the complete cycle to the kids.”

While the Master Gardners led the effort to bring back the garden in the short term, they couldn’t have done it without a number of generous donations with around Orange. The tubs were donated about a year ago by a local farmer who initially used them to hold cow feed. The other supplies were donated by the local Tractor Supply Co., the car dealership Reynolds GM Subaru and local garden center Darnell’s Garden Patch.

Thanks to the generosity of these businesses, which Noxon described as “very heartwarming,” the Master Gardners were able to put together the temporary garden in just three weeks. They visited the club last month is help the kids plant everything in their new garden, and since then the garden club has gone out and watered the plants every morning.

Hepburn said the kids enjoy the opportunity to go outside and tend to the garden every day.

“We have water buckets, where we fill them up and each kid has a water bucket where they can water whatever plant they want,” she said.