SPEDA mini-grant recipient Glory Gardens & Greenhouse introduces farming to 40 summer campers

Editor’s note: This is the first of a four-part series highlighting the 2025 recipients of SPEDA’s mini-grant program. The program awards four $2,500 grants annually to businesses that aspire to innovate and grow.

This summer, the greenhouses at Glory Gardens & Greenhouse were growing — not just plants and flowers, but the minds of children as they learned about life on the farm. For farm owner Ashley DeBord, those wide-eyed moments were what she had hoped for when she opened her gates to nearly 40 campers.

“Kids want to learn about agriculture. You just have to give them the chance,” she said. “It’s endless what they can learn.”

This was the first year for Little Sprouts Farm Camp, held in two week-long sessions of about 20 children each. The first camp focused more on flowers, as that was what was growing in June, while the second, in July, introduced pumpkins and mums. Each camp day brought something new beyond the greenhouses — feeding animals, digging in the dirt, bug catching, and science demonstrations.

For DeBord, the highlight was simple: “Watching them light up when they got to touch and feed animals. That was the most rewarding part. That, and bug hunting,” she added with a laugh.

A first-generation farmer

DeBord’s path to farming was not the traditional one. She grew up the only girl in a long line of farm boys, the first woman in her family to go to college. After graduating with a teaching degree, she decided to turn back to something she had learned from her grandmother — how to feed people.

“I started growing crops the year after college,” she recalled. “Vegetables at first, then flowers. My grandmother taught me to make sure your family is fed, and I carried that with me.”

By 2012, she was raising produce on a wholesale scale. In 2018, she shifted into retail sales. Today, the farm is a mix of greenhouses, a retail storefront, and nine acres of vegetable production supported by a team of seven employees and two full-time H-2A workers. White half-runner beans, cantaloupe, pumpkins, and perennials fill the fields, while her husband Stephen manages 450 acres of hay and the family’s cattle herd, as well as working off the farm as a lineman for South Kentucky RECC.

Ashley and Stephen’s two sons, Logan (11) and Ellis (9), are already finding their own place in the operation. Logan has charge of two acres of pumpkins, while Ellis prefers working with his herd of Hereford cattle.

“If they carry it on one day, great,” their mom said. “And if they don’t, that’s okay too.”

Building Little Sprouts

The idea for the camp had been growing in the back of DeBord’s mind for years. The Somerset-Pulaski Economic Development Authority (SPEDA) mini-grant program finally gave her the resources and confidence to launch it.

“It gave me the start-up money and made it possible to keep the camp affordable,” she said.

She plans to expand next year, possibly offering more weeks, though she intends to keep each session small. “I want to know every kid’s name. When they know me and I know them, they’re more likely to take something away from the experience.”

One of the most memorable lessons came through a partnership with the local National Resources Conservation Service office. Using a tabletop model and a spray bottle, staff showed campers how water moves through different landscapes. When rain fell on the model’s rooftops, one boy stopped in his tracks.

“You mean the water runs off my roof and goes into the lake?” he asked.

“That was the moment it clicked,” DeBord said. “Those connections are what it’s all about.”

Lessons in diversity

Ask DeBord what she hopes campers take home, and she doesn’t hesitate: diversity.

“Every day was different out here — one day it was bugs, another day it was vegetables, another day a scavenger hunt,” she said. “A farm isn’t just one thing. It provides all kinds of things to a community.”

She says that same philosophy has kept her farm growing. “It takes collaboration and diversity. Partnering with others, learning from them, and finding ways to make the land work in more than one direction. That’s the key.”

Little Sprouts Farm Camp may have started small, but DeBord sees it as part of something bigger — both for her farm and for her family.

“I’m laying a foundation,” she said. “Whether my boys carry it on or not, they’ll know what it takes. And hopefully, the kids who came here this summer walk away with that same understanding — of how much our world depends on agriculture, and how much they’re part of it.”