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Our organic EverGreen Farm sponsors Equine Therapy Associates (ETA), a Premier Center of North American Riding for the Handicapped (NARHA). We offer the therapeutic benefits of an organic farm setting, certified instructors, cuddly cats, and trained ponies to enable children and adults (aged 3-90!) to ameoiorate physical, mental and emotional challenges. Our "Happy Place of Learning" always needs trained volunteers, and students in need of scholarships! We sell heirloom plants and bushes, along with custom photography (flora and fauna) to support our Scholarship Program. Visit us at www.equinetherapyassociates.com, and learn about our exercise and nutrition based programming below. We'd love to have you join our inspiring team in Montgomery County's beautiful Agricultural Reserve! Visit us on Montgomery County's Farm Tour on July 26 (Saturday) from 10:00 a.m. until 4:00 p.m. Contact us via our website if you wish to volunteer or register for riding lessons: www.equinetherapyassociates.com.
ETA Works to Combat Obesity in Children! This year some 90% of our students will be children or adolescents. If they match the national average, approximately one third of them will be overweight or obese (15%). ETA helps combat this epidemic in three ways: by assigning an individually developed take-home series of exercises to build strength, endurance and dexterity (done in the home, at school, or in cars 3-7 times+ a week), by ensuring that all 90 minute riding lessons at the farm are fast-paced, weight-bearing, and fun, and by planting a garden to encourage our students to eat many more fresh fruits and vegetables! Planting & Cultivating a Vegetable Garden Promotes Health! Unlike past eras in America, especially since the height of vegetable gardening in WWII, when 95% of households had large vegetable gardens, the vast majority of our student riders have never seen a vegetable garden, and have never cultivated one. In fact, most of them, especially the younger ones, consider food to appear almost miraculously at Giant or Safeway, with no conceptual understanding of farms or animals. Also unlike most of our volunteers here at ETA, the vast majority of our lower income students have gotten since l988 virtually all of their vegetable calories from three items: canned tomatoes, white potatoes and iceberg lettuce. So, ETA annually plants a garden that explores the wealth of God’s creation! Although our volunteers, our family and or paid helpers may plant the garden, our students cultivate it, and pick take-home items from June through November. Our produce includes up to 12 varieties of low-acid heirloom tomatoes (historic seeds that are vigorous, naturally resistant to pests, and drought tolerant), usually six varieties of peppers (including hot ones), two varieties of beans (string and yellow wax), peas, spinach, eggplant, Swiss Chard, radishes, lettuce varieties, herbs, melon, cucumbers, and squash. Often, we will plant melons and or pumpkins on our compost heaps in the back fields; they grow to be HUGE but we only eat a few, as the dear love them as well. After training, our volunteers go home with seeds or plants for their own vegetable and flower gardens! We encourage our volunteers to enjoy them as they remember their time with us at ETA, and to think about donating some of the produce to their local food bank, elderly neighbors, or a shelter. Organic vegetables produced at home taste better, look nicer, and lower the carbon imprint! Composting Boosts Garden Production, Saves $$ and Waste You may have read recently in The Washington Post that Home Depot and Lowes are being pressure by environmentalists to stop buying and selling cypress mulch, which is produced by clear-cutting sensitive forests in the American south. By contrast, producing our own compost from horse manure is FREE, except for the labor of pushing wheelbarrows, and the ponies EACH produce TEN TONS (20,000 lbs.) of rich compost, or free fertilizer, each year! Our volunteers are invited to take home compost for their own gardens. Visit us at www.equinetherapyassociates.com. Thank you! Last Activity More than one year ago
What we have:
trees therapy riding plants plants photography organic of NARHA horses heirloom heirloom heirloom bushes animals and
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