Putting Down Roots: How We Continue To Grow Our Community Heading Into the Fall Season
Amelia is a Patrick Henry High School 2025 graduate and participated in SCCG’s Youth Ambassador program this Summer.
By Amelia Kirkegaard
As we feel the change in the air signaling the shift from Summer to Fall, we sow new seeds and look forward to the upcoming season and all the wonderful events it will bring. Simultaneously, we’re also looking back on a bountiful Summer harvest of produce, events, and community memories.
At least, I know I definitely am. After an amazing summer of working at the San Carlos Community Garden as an Ambassador for 9 weeks with 5 fellow ambassadors, I find myself looking back on my transformative experience at the garden, while also looking forward to where I’ll next cultivate my future prospects.
Like most of my fellow ambassadors, I joined the program after learning about it through Ms. Dicken’s AP Environmental Science class at Patrick Henry High School. Learning about soil degradation, trophic cascades, ozone holes, and pollution beyond repair, it was easy to feel like everything was horribly doomed. It led many of us to question: how could we possibly be capable of making any real change? Yet Ms. Dickens was able to encourage us towards practical solutions, and how to make a difference. One day, something she said stuck with me. She described how whenever she felt hopeless, she just went and did something. A cleanup, a community event, anything to accomplish something, however seeming small, because small actions add up to make a massive difference.
The San Carlos Community Garden Youth Ambassadors for 2025.
So when I saw the opportunity to make my difference at the San Carlos Community Garden, I seized it, along with 5 other wonderful peers. And I learned so much in the process.
Every Saturday for 9 weeks, we were greeted by a different teacher who taught us about so many philosophies and facets of gardening down to how to treat the soil under our feet up to the trees that extended above. We participated in an interactive learning environment, putting our knowledge to practical work. One week we were installing a beehive, the next we were making native seed packets, then practicing how to take a moment and capture the world around us through sketching plants. The combination of learning and working allowed us to understand how to make a positive change based on each week’s exciting topic.
2025 SCCG Youth Ambassadors, Sean and Amelia, picking lettuce from SCCG’s food pantry garden.
Youth Ambassadors assembled seed packets of native plant species with Wild Ones San Diego.
Youth Ambassadors had an up close instruction on the superpowers of soil and compost with SCCG volunteers, James Hyde and Michael Land,.
But installing beehives or how to make the best compost wasn’t all we learned or did. In the midst of all of our community events, sometime between when I was harvesting tomatoes with my fellow ambassadors laughing and making jokes the whole time, or breaking some of the most delicious bread and jam I’ve ever tasted with community members during SCCG’s monthly held Produce Swap, or listening to the thrumming guitar chords during the Summer concert series seeming to reverberate in every leaf and root and off nearby Cowles mountain itself - I thought back to this plant principle I’d learned on one of our Saturday sessions.
That a plant can only grow as tall as its roots ground it, extending down into the earth. I realized that this principle doesn’t just apply to plants, but applies to us as well. That it’s the roots we plant, the community we ground ourselves in and give back to, that extends ourselves further, creating and contributing meaningful change.
To solve the problems I’d heard about in Ms. Dicken's class and wanted to do just about anything to try to fix, I realized that doing something, as she mentioned, was just the first step she’d given us. Through this process of doing, and my experience at SCCG, I realized that in order to create meaningful change, it starts with the community that you nurture that empowers you to act together. It’s the people you connect with, the likeminded souls you meet at meditations, trade produce with, or find reading a book in the garden, that come together with a promise of solving any one of the thousands of environmental problems we confront today. And that starts here, at our San Carlos Community Garden, where we choose to put down our roots.
So let’s have an amazing season ahead - growing the roots of our community deep in every event we attend, conversation we have, and seed we plant.
Learn how you can volunteer with SCCG by visiting their website at www.sancarlocommunitygarden.com or email them at info@sancarloscommunitygarden.com
Amelia and her fellow SCCG Youth Ambassadors spent a day with guest instructor, Yvonne Byers, a botany and fine arts trained tattoo artist who provided a wonderful introduction to plant anatomy followed by hands-on drawing instruction.
