He’s also collected thousands of pounds of canned goods via food drives he’s organized each summer for three years. Each summer, Logan spends a week printing flyers and distributing them door-to-door to spread the word about the food drive, then has his grandmother drive him around to collect the cans in the course of one day.
Logan, the son of Randy and Diane Grimes of West Chester Twp., said he was inspired to both his gardening and can-collecting efforts by the food drives for Reach Out Lakota he participated in at Freedom Elementary, but equally concerned by the realization that the group’s supplies would “go down a substantial amount” each summer.
“Their shelves would be all bare,” he said. “So I started to donate some of the food in my garden at home to them.”
That led to spending more than 100 hours each summer taking care of Reach Out Lakota’s garden. He also sold lemonade, shoveled snow and held a garage sale to raise the money needed to upgrade fencing and purchase supplies for the garden.
To get the plants for the garden, Logan volunteered at Varnau’s West Chester Garden Center on West Chester Road.
“They were generous and they gave me all these plants,” said Logan, gesturing toward 45 tomato plants and 45 pepper plants. Why those particular vegetables? “I’ve kind of done a little bit of research and just thought that tomatoes and peppers are easy to prepare, easy to cook. There’s all types of things you can do with them, so I thought that would be a great thing they could use.”
Logan’s love for gardening started at early age. At eight, it was pots in a deck area at home. Then he moved to the yard, starting off with 10-by-5 plots of land, followed by 20-by-5 and, after three years or so, 40-by-40, even while tending a 20-by-5 plot of land at home.
“Every year I progress and … I try to make something bigger or better or improve something I’ve worked on,” he said. “I just try and do as much good as I can.”
Logan, who is entering eighth grade at Ridge Junior School, was one of six students from the Greater Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky region honored in May as a 2014 Student “Heroes of Character.” Despite the accolade, he’s unconcerned with being in the spotlight.
“I’m not doing it for people to notice me,” he said. “I’m doing it so people my age know that can also do stuff like this, that they can make a difference in their community and they can try and help out.”
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