Come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

I said the Homegrown, Homegrown Come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

I said, we food , we food, come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

From the earth to the dirt, come let we till up the soil, till up the soil, from the earth to the dirt, come let we keep planting on a while You see the homegrown I said it come from earth.

I say the good food come make me plant me we own.

I say the good food, good food Come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

I said I food, I food Come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

I said, Your food, your food Come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

I said the Homegrown, Homegrown Come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

Hi I'm Osbert Potter, Executive Director of the Virgin Islands public Television System and welcome to Homegrown.

As you can see, I'm preparing a box so that I can start a vegetable garden.

I'm doing this because I've decided to make change to a healthier living style by growing my own fresh vegetables and herbs in my garden.

For me and my family to eat WTJX's Homegrown program was started with this in mind and with the help of a grant from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and a partnership with the Virgin Islands Department of Agriculture and the University of the Virgin Islands Cooperative Extension Services, we are able to develop a program that would introduce vegetable gardening to the people of the Virgin Islands.

Because we live on an island, we are very isolated.

So the majority of the foods that we import, by the time it gets here is either already close to being spoiled or, you know, spoil.

Fresh produce is no exception.

If you can't get fresh fruits and vegetables, you're going to be missing it out of your diet.

We can't afford to do that because hand of Virgin Islands, we have a high rate of obesity, which leads to medical issues like hypertension, heart disease and diabetes, because traditionally our diets are filled foods that contain high fat and salt content.

Let's hear from Caryl Johnson, a nutritionist with the University of the Virgin Islands Extension Services.

I'm Dr. Caryl Johnson.

I am program supervisor of Family Consumer Science and for age with the Cooperative Extension Service at the University of the Virgin Islands.

I first heard about home grown project through Carlos Robles, who works with the Cooperative Extension Service.

Today we're going to talk about eating healthy, the foods that you can grow in your garden, and some things to think about when you're eating out of the garden.

And I want to focus on fresh fruits and vegetables.

If we will look at the food pyramid, you can see that we have a lot of dark green vegetables and then we have a lot of fresh fruit.

Those are the two groups that I want to focus on each day.

We should be eating lots of fresh vegetables, which you could be growing in your garden.

You need to have two and a half cups of vegetables every day.

When you select vegetables, it's best to select the very dark green or a very, very deep yellow.

Yellow would be like pumpkin, like our local pumpkin or carrots.

Yams would be fine.

Also, the dark green would be like broccoli, okra, any of the really dark, dark greens.

We don't really want to go into like a light green like you'd have with iceberg lettuce as a head lettuce.

We prefer not to have that because it doesn't have as much vitamin A and vitamin C in it.

And the fruits we should be eating two cups every day.

And mangoes are very high in vitamin C and that would be a good selection.

Oranges is also good selection of vitamin C and of course papaya is very high in C. Also high in A, it would be the dark are the deep yellow, which is good and cars bananas are high in potassium.

So we should be eating mostly from these two groups which you can grow in your garden.

Now, what are some reasons that we need to be eating fresh fruits and vegetables?

Well, one is we need to think about good health for our family.

And if you will eat every day, the amount that I just said, two cups of fruit.

And by the way, let me give you the serving size.

I don't have a measuring cup that if you don't have a measuring cup, like I don't have one today, a tennis ball would be a small serving of fruit.

So if you had, for instance, an orange the size of a tennis ball, that would be a small serving.

If you had a baseball size, that's a medium to a large serving of fruit.

So that would be one way that you could calculate the serving size.

But we want to eat fruit because it is very, very high in vitamins and minerals.

It gives us energy.

We want them natural sugar as opposed to this kind of sugar.

And I am going to talk about this kind of sugar right now.

If you or your child comes in from school and wants something to eat.

Mom, I'm starving.

Please try to give them some fresh fruit or some fresh vegetables out of your garden as opposed to this juice.

Now, this juice is pineapple orange drink.

And I want to read on the back of the label because we need to start looking at labels that this has 38 grams of sugar.

Now, this is a small container.

This only contains ten fluid ounces.

The formula for converting grams into teaspoons because we really don't think in grams is to divide the 38 grams by 4.2 and it gives us nine teaspoons of sugar.

So just in this one little bottle is a lot of sugar.

Nine teaspoons of sugar.

So it would be a better choice.

This is orange to give your child a tangerine or a fresh arms because not only are they getting the juice from the from the fruit, but they're getting a high vitamin C, They're also getting the fiber.

And the fiber is very, very important for health reasons.

Now to eat fresh fruits and vegetables, we're less likely to have some health issues.

We know that there is a high incidence of obesity within the islands, and we're seeing more and more childhood obesity.

Many times.

That is not what the child or the person is eating.

It is beverages like this, what they're drinking.

We live in a hot climate, so it's really easy to down a lot of these and, you know, even an hour.

So I would like to encourage you to do the fresh fruits and the vegetables, the natural fruit and vegetable, give you more energy.

The children and the rest of you will think better if you have fresh fruits and vegetables because the brain works with different vitamins and various minerals.

Also, if we eat healthy, we feel better, we look better, we have a better self-concept, which all of us would like to have, and then we are less likely to get certain types of diseases.

I want to encourage all of you, and especially those of you that have been involved in the homegrown project to get your friends, your relatives and your neighbors involved in growing a garden.

You see, just by including fresh vegetables in our diets, we can make a big difference in how we feel and how we look.

The Department of Agriculture supply the home grown participants with the seedlings that they needed to plant a vegetable garden.

Hi, I'm Carlos Robles at the UVI cooperative Extension Service.

And welcome to Home Grown.

We're on the big island of Saint Croix today as we continue our home grown project and we're at the Rudolph Shulterbrandt Agricultural Complex And with me today is the Honorable Louis Peterson, the Commissioner of Agriculture.

Commissioner Peterson, welcome to Homegrown.

Thank you very much and welcome.

Have you.

Glad to be on Saint Croix and got to be at the complex.

Tell us where we are today.

Well, welcome, everyone, to the Rudolph Shulterbrandt Agricultural Complex .

This is the headquarters for the Department of Agriculture.

And our mission, everyone is to develop, to promote the development of a sustainable economic food production industry.

And one of the ways that we do so is by supporting our producers, by providing healthy plant seedlings, vegetable and seedlings.

And that is why we are here today.

I think, Commissioner, you and I, you know, I've done our gardening and we've instructed people in the past and we continue to do about taking care of seeds.

How important is understanding this aspect of gardening?

Extremely important to begin with.

We want to really advocate that anyone into gardening, including the home grown participants, use very good quality seeds that for for production.

We also want to recognize that the variety of seed type what is tomato, cucumber, etc.

is also important because not every variety does well where we are.

Good point.

So having good quality seeds is important, but as well, knowing what varieties do well here in the Territory is important.

Okay, so the seedlings that you have here at the department generally work well under our conditions.

Yes, they do.

They've been tried and tested and the varieties that we have here to provide to our producers have been ones that have been traditionally doing well here in the Territory to tolerate our high temperatures, our dry conditions sometimes, and basically, like I said, produce well under those conditions.

So it is good for homeowners to know that, you know, you don't just gather up seeds from anywhere.

There's a method to it.

And here here at the University of the Virgin Islands at the research center, they've done test on some of the seeds that we actually use here.

These have been found to be the ones that do best under our conditions.

And so as we've shared with you before, if you need information, education or just some advice on seeds or seedlings or anything having to do with agriculture, you can call the Cooperative Extension Service.

You can come by the Department of Agriculture that professionals in both agencies.

Right, Commissioner?

Of course there is that are able to provide us with information.

The University of the Virgin Islands Cooperative Extension Services provided a technical assistance to our gardeners.

Let's hear from Kwame Garcia and Stafford Crossman about their experiences with this program.

Hi, my name is Kwame Garcia.

I'm the state director for the UVI Cooperative Extension Service here at the Cooperative Extension Service.

We are involved in a variety of community social programs that help the community, and one of them is agriculture, agriculture and natural resource Program.

Many months ago, Mr. Osbert Potter approached me about a special program that WTJX channel 12 wanted just to begin.

This program dealt with agriculture.

They wanted to help our families grow fresh fruits and vegetables in their backyard.

And so they approached me about it.

And together with the Department of Agriculture, the Cooperative Extension Service was very happy to be a part of this program because we know the problems we are having here in this community and and throughout the nation right now in the area in obesity people and not eating right food and and they're gaining a lot of unnecessary weight.

And also, we have a problem with the high cost of food in this community.

Food is one of the major is the major expense that a family have.

So I immediately said, yes, we are going to be a part of this program.

This program involved box gardening.

It involves container gardening and it involves traditional gardening, but it's not a program for the farmer.

It is a program for families and individuals who want to just grow some good vegetables and fruits.

And one will save some money and want to eat healthy.

The Cooperative Extension Service, we we we put, I believe, semi Stafford Crossman and St. Croix with Mr. Carlos Robles as the host and a leader and they together with some of the other staff, they provided technical assistance to the people who join these program.

This program we have we had 42 individuals.

We had individual homes in Christ and Thomas in John White Island.

We try to pick people from the eastern part of the island to the middle part of the island, the western part of Olive Tree Island, so that we could really teach agric culture and how to grow vegetables in all type of soil.

I am very happy to be a part of this program because today obesity is a major problem that we are faced with eating fresh fruits and vegetables and doing a little walk gardening in the backyard in your backyard is one way that we can now fight obesity.

And the other problem that we have in our community is and another benefit of this program is just the main economics of not having to purchase your fresh fruits and vegetables.

But by utilizing what we taught in this homegrown program, I think any and every family can benefit.

And I want to thank Channel 12 WTJX Mr. Potter and also the Department of Agriculture, Dr. Lois Peterson, for being a part of this program and for allowing the Cooperative Extension Service to partner with them for being such a part of such a wonderful program.

Thank you very much.

I'm Stafford Crossman with the Cooperative Extension Service at the University of the Virgin Islands.

And I heard about the Homegrown program when we had a meeting of the entities that we're partnering with WTJX That is the extension service and also the Virgin Islands Department of Agriculture to develop this series that is intended to encourage local residents to utilize whatever space they have available to grow their own food.

The intention is to save money and eat healthy.

It was a very rewarding experience having the opportunity to work with the participants.

It was a very loud response and we had to go through a selection process.

We selected participants on various parts of the island that is on the East and the West End and in the central part of the island.

And we had gardens in three categories.

We had container gardens, we had conventional gardens and we had box gardens.

Another good thing about the program is that the persons selected to participate were from varied groups.

We had school groups, we had afterschool programs, and we had residents who just have a home garden.

My role in the project was to assist with the organization and to provide technical assistance and technical advice to the participants in the project.

It was a very rewarding experience for me.

Some of the persons who participated were persons who had very little or no experience in farming, and as we walked along with them to see their knowledge increase and the enthusiasm that they had in the program that I found to be could be a very rewarding part of the of the program.

They were challenges, but we were able to overcome the challenges.

And one of the things that this program will demonstrate is that regardless of the situation that you're in and the challenges that we face, we got in soil and availability of water.

Everyone can still grow something in their in their backyard, on their porch, whatever space that they they have available.

And I would like to encourage all Virgin Islands residents and everyone to grow something for yourself and eat healthy and go home grown.

And you'll also benefit from the exercise that you get from the environment and farming activities.

One funny story is the I think it was at one of the the school gardens and the way that the children decorated the garden and some of the things that some of the other participants did in order to keep away.

I think some of the pests, it probably might have been bugs, but I know at one of the school there was a scarecrow that was put in the garden and it was funny the way the scarecrow was dressed and decorated some.

I did some of the challenges that the persons had was their inexperience in, in gardening.

Others had challenges with the soil that they had available in some instances for the box gardens.

We had to bring soil and topsoil in from other locations in order for them to be successful.

But all of the participants were very willing to learn and they were very enthusiastic and they were very pleased when the time came for them to harvest their vegetables.

I certainly do recommend that everyone to get and there are challenges, but there are ways to overcome whatever challenges they have, whether it is availability of water, the systems that you can put to use irrigation systems which are very efficient in the application of water to the plants and we got in soil.

There are modifications that you can make to the soil.

The amendments that you can put in the soil are in the worst case situation.

You can get topsoil from somewhere else and incorporate it into your garden.

We started this project way back in August of 2009 with a team of employees and our partners.

Our mission was clear.

We wanted to start an outreach project designed to address the issues of very high costs and poor quality of vegetables imported into the Virgin Islands and to encourage healthy eating habits.

We conducted an extensive site visit campaign to find our home grown participants.

We narrowed it down to 42 participants.

We chose applicants from St Croix, S.A., Saint John and Water Island, and placed them in appropriate gardening categories with the help of Agriculture Commissioner Dr. Louis Peterson and Yuba State Director of Cooperative Extension Services, Kwame Garcia.

We chose plants that will do well in our climate.

Participants were given plants that they would be able to make a salad out of, such as lettuce, tomato, cucumbers, beets, parsley, beans and green pepper and green onions.

Our home grown gardeners receive expert technical help from Mr. Carlos Robles and Mr. Stafford Crossman to help them get their gardens off to a good start.

And they gave them one on one help when they needed it.

Hi, I'm Carlos Robles with the UVI Cooperative Extension Service.

I'm the acting district supervisor for the St Thomas St John District and I'm also an extension specialist in horticulture.

About a year and a half ago, we sat in a meeting with our state director, Mr. Kwame Garcia, to discuss a potential partnership with WTJX and the Virgin Islands Department of Agriculture to put on a series of programs that would combine healthy living as well as gardening.

And as one of the things that we do in at the Cooperative Extension Service.

We gave it a lot of thought.

We looked at how many angles we could look at in terms of bringing that knowledge and information to us.

But the thing that really sparked our interest was the fact that we now have had an opportunity as an agency to get our message out to the community and the information that we provide through a long series of instructional video type documentary.

And when we thought about it from that angle, we were willing to jump on it.

And from that homegrown with the extension service cooperation and the partnership between WTJX and the Department of Agriculture was born.

And so we sat around looking at how we're going to do this, and we started looking at it from the agricultural and how we were going to make this be as beneficial to as many Virgin Islands residents as possible.

And so we toyed with several ideas and we eventually boil it down to having geographical locations on all three islands, actually all four islands, because we included Water Island as well.

And we wanted to make sure that we provided information to the community in under any and all circumstances so that we can show them that you can grow vegetables and some fruits just about anywhere.

Once you provide the right conditions for the plant growth and development and given the surroundings that you have at present and where you are and your location, you may not be able to grow all things, but you can grow something.

And that's that intrigued us.

That gave us an opportunity to look at and challenge us to be able to provide the kind of necessary advice on the spot in a given locale.

Because as we all know in the Virgin Islands, depending on where you live, it can be a rainy area such as in the rainforest area, in in St Croix or in the north northwest island of Saint Thomas or in the central portions of Coos Bay or actually in Saint John.

Then you also have the drier areas of both St Thomas and St. Croix, St. John, and then you have Water Island, which is primarily dry all the time.

How can we work this out so that people who are living in those areas can grow something and benefit?

And so we sat down and we brainstorm and we came up with several locations throughout the Virgin Islands and again on Water Island.

And we selected some areas and we brought it down to approximately 42 individuals, 42 homeowners that we looked at as part as participating in this program.

And so those 42 people were distributed throughout the territory, different locations, different growing conditions.

And the challenge was on it was quite interesting.

Some of the folks had had some level of knowledge in agriculture or gardening, and there were some that had no knowledge whatsoever.

So that really gave us an opportunity to spread the knowledge around.

But watch how people took the information that we provided for them and use it in their individual circumstances.

So we set out, we selected the individuals and we proceeded to help work with them in growing their areas.

We had it spread in three basic categories containers and tires, raised beds or box gardens and traditional gardens, which included terraces, which is traditional for Saint Thomas.

Even though you do have some flat areas where you can do some flat gardening.

But basically Saint Thomas was on hills and in Saint Croix we did flat land traditional gardening.

And so those were how the 42 people were redistributed.

We ran with the program.

We help them grow it and it was a great success, just about all of them.

They experienced quite a bit of things and so you get a chance to see this.

We ask that you think about getting an arm.

Sure, You're going to be inspired by what you see in this program.

It is.

You can do it.

Some of the people that are in here at the beginning didn't think that they can do it, but you can do this and if you need for more information, you could always call the Cooperative Extension Service.

We want you in the Virgin Islands community to be a healthy people.

And part of that health growing process is growing your own food.

So we look forward and we challenge you.

If you have questions, call the Cooperative Extension Service.

Call the VA Department of Agriculture, and we can provide you with any assistance that you need and getting started.

You can do this, you can garden, you can be healthy.

Our participants face their challenges head on and planted their gardens.

The best shot hours of footage to create a homegrown series.

We have put together 16 episodes that includes instructions on box gardening, container, gardening, raised bed gardening and traditional gardening.

How to install irrigation system, choosing seeds and caring for the seedlings, and how to spot problem insects in your garden and follow up with our home grown gardeners have been a constant on the road to a healthier lifestyle is oftentimes a long and difficult one.

So we want to help you get along that road by showing you that you can make a change.

One way you can make that change is to start your own vegetable garden.

Get your family, friends and neighbors involved.

Because not only is it a way to get fresh vegetables into your diet, but it's also a way to get exercise, relieve stress and save some money.

I've started our journey and I hope you will join me soon.

I hope to see you in the garden.

I remember.

Stay on the Dozen.

Come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

I said the Homegrown, Homegrown Come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

I said, we food , we food, come let we plant it, plant it, plant it.

From the earth to the dirt, come let we till up the soil, till up the soil, from the earth to the dirt, come let we keep planting on a while