Comparison group for youth gardens.
Aggregate traits. Unlike the rental gardens, youth were more likely to participate collectively in community
Gardens. Typically, they came to their sites from community or daycare
center programs. In addition, most of the children came from low income
families and were members of ethnic minorities. For the comparison site, we
pursued a community center program for low income youth, but one where
clients did not garden. However, because of the small number of
community centers in Waukesha and Kenosha and the pervasiveness of
of gardening), and age and gender (because of the age and gender variation
in daily exercise, diet and social factors).
Community Gardens, we failed to find a program where a large number of
children did not garden. Thus we selected a Milwaukee community center
program-Holton Youth daycamp-as a comparison site for both youth
gardens.
Individual traits. We matched the intervention and comparison
groups on the basis of ethnic backgrounds (because of the cultural sali