Diana Hart, Poplar Village Gardens
Channel: Fort Wayne SOUP
Date: 2020-07-10

Diana Hart, Garden Director for Poplar Village Gardens and owner of On Broadway Daycare, has lived in the diverse Poplar neighborhood for more than 30 years. For most of that time, she's run On Broadway Daycare out of her home. The Level 4 Daycare program centers much of its curriculum around teaching children to grow their own food. Over the last decade, she transformed her property into a permaculture food forest, and many of the meals the children eat are prepared from food they've grown from seeds. Diana's passion for permaculture and sustainable community led her to take the Master Gardener Certificate Course through Purdue University in 2014, and the Urban Agriculture Certificate Course in 2019. These courses became the first steps toward developing her neighborhood’s vacant lots into park-like food forests. Over the last year, Poplar Village Gardens has started growing its first new orchard on Miner Street, with plans to create more micro-gardens throughout the neighborhood. A minimum of 50% of the food grown is gifted to residents of the neighborhood or to the food bank, providing hundreds of pounds of free produce to the community and beautifying the Poplar Neighborhood.

Find Diana @
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/poplarvillagegardens 
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/poplarvillagegardens/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1VR0fzg14XLs8cFAIZDeRg