When some people’s lives give them lemons, they make lemonade. Heather Smith makes salad—and lots of it. Over the last decade, she suffered the loss of her sister and mother, and after struggling to have children, Smith finally welcomed two healthy babies. Smith had been a nuclear medicine technologist, but she was ready for a change. After a divorce and a few years staying home with her sons, she decided to use her experience diagnosing patients as the springboard to a new career. And she wanted to explore healthy living. “I wanted to help people stay off the [examination] table,” she says.
Today, Smith is a certified holistic health coach and the founder of Eat Play Grow, where she provides healthy living guidance to people of all ages. In particular, she is downright ecstatic about her role in educating teachers and school children about nutrition by way of Tower Gardens.
Tower Gardens are vertical, aeroponic growing systems featuring 20 openings to hold seeds for flowers, fruits, herbs and vegetables. The system includes a 20-gallon reservoir base with a pump that pulls water up through the system’s core, allowing the mineral-enriched water to rain down on the plants’ roots. Plants thrive outdoors during warmer months, and the tower can winter indoors with help from grow lights.
When her son Charlie, now a third grader, entered kindergarten at Groveland Elementary School in 2013, Smith asked his teacher if she was interested in having a Tower Garden in the classroom. Thanks to a grant from the Minnetonka Foundation, the school was able to make the purchase. “The garden in the kindergarten classroom was so successful that the idea has spread across the district,” says Smith. “The kids do the work. They get to be the farmers.”
Maryrose Adamek’s third-grade classroom at Groveland has harvested herbs, including basil, dill, rosemary and thyme. Butter lettuces, romaine and rainbow chard have made their way into snack-time salads for the students. The garden also serves a more academic purpose. “It’s a perfect fit for our third-grade classroom,” Adamek says, because the science curriculum focuses on plant life and structures. “We get to see the entire growth of a plant from seed,” she says. “The kids get to touch and smell and use all of their senses when they’re learning.”
Smith also loves the time she spends volunteering to educate kids about healthy options. “I feel like I’m doing so much more than I could have with nuclear medicine,” she says. She often hears from parents that their children ask for healthier food from the grocery store. Smith says she loves seeing “the ripple effect from the kids to the parents, and teaching parents to eat better, too.”
Heather Smith offers hints to encourage better food choices.
Encourage children to choose at least one produce item at the grocery store and have them help prepare it.
Explain why it is important to properly fuel kids’ bodies. Describe how foods help us grow and learn.
Discuss how they feel after eating certain foods. They might discover that eating a lot of pasta or sugar makes their bodies react differently from fresh fruits and veggies.
Make it fun. Have a crunch contest, for example. Set out mini sweet bell peppers and have kids decide which color offers the best crunch.
