Earth Matters

School Gardens

Have you ever walked in a garden with second graders clamoring to eat fresh leaves of winter kale? Have you ever listened to middle schoolers discuss and design a chicken coop that will be integrated into the surrounding garden and orchard? What about fifth graders happily popping the popcorn they grew and harvested? Yummm.

All of these scenes are common in a school garden. Alice Waters, already a well known chef for her innovative, cuisine at Chez Panisse, coined the term Edible Schoolyards and made it happen at a public school in Berkeley, California. She followed her basic rule: let good tasting food be your guide. In schools that meant young people growing their own organic food, preparing and eating it together.

Most kids are raised on fast food and food grown on industrial farms, that is, the normal American diet. Yet the effects are alarming: obesity, early diabetes and asthma, hormonal imbalance, and early pubescence. School nutrition programs have not responded well to these problems. Many foods are fried in oil and more processed foods enter the cafeteria line.

Enter School Gardens. Land is transformed into an organic garden. Teachers and students spend time gardening and share the rewards around a common table. Their bodies become healthier, their minds more knowledgeable, and their hearts more connected to fellow gardeners and the critters and soil of the garden.

My goal is to nurture resilient kids by creating organic gardens, outdoor classrooms, and edible landscapes in homes for children and public and private schools. I want to give children first hand experience with the soil, seeds, water, plants, and bugs so that they will take better care of themselves and the earth.

My first large project was with Sarah Gibbs, former director of SEEDS in Durham, at Elon Homes for Children in Elon, North Carolina. For four years we worked with students who redesigned their residences and the grounds. We created a flourishing garden and Sarah integrated the garden food into the residential kitchens. Take a look at the pictures, below, to see some of the beautiful gardens they made.

I am presently devoting a lot of time at Greensboro Montessori School. We began with a simple fifth grade garden, but it soon grew to encompass the entire school and now have two acres under cultivation. What a treat to have Alice Waters visit us during the fall of 2009 and see what we’ve done.

We follow Permaculture design so a large part of it is devoted to fruit trees and bushes and perennial crops. During the Fall and Spring semesters almost every student has a weekly gardening session. Each session has a little work, a little wonder, and a little taste. In time they all become very proficient at gardening and attentive to details like worms and toads.

We often graze in the garden; we roam around tasting what’s ready—spinach, kale, peaches, peppers, figs. We have 15 kinds of fruit and many herbs and vegetables so there is always something. They develop discerning taste buds. We pop our home grown corn and compare it to the best of the store bought varieties and it’s like the difference between real kernels and cardboard. Skeptical eaters become enthusiasts for kale, green bean and French spinach. They name the plants according to their taste: arugula is the pepper plant, French sorrel the sour plant, sweet cherry tomatoes are candy.

We prepare food in the kitchen when we can. We grated a lot of carrots for 350 carrot muffins and diced a peck of tomatoes for veggie wraps. It’s fun to cook food, but we’ve noticed that they are happiest when the food is fresh and raw. There is something bold and satisfying about it.

Not only are young people involved but college students serve as garden interns that help me maintain the gardens and teach the children. They become competent teachers and gardeners and several want to go on to become small farmers. The program would not exist without their enthusiasm and many hours of labor.

Another school, Greensboro Day School, also has a garden. This one is maintained by the seventh graders under Dr. Valerie Vickers, a science teach, naturalist, and peace activist. Her specialty is environmental education and she uses the Permaculture garden as an outdoor classroom for her 70 students. Its design incorporates some wild features such as a pond and densely growing areas; these facilitate naturalist studies. Other areas are for annual crops and still others are densely stacked orchards. Dr. Vickers nurtures their ecological literacy by having them consider their Ecological Footprint and their Ecological Address.

I am most concerned with bringing school gardens into public schools. Indeed, I and several interns helped the teachers of Newcomer’s School develop one. The Newcomer’s School is a unique public school that offers an English immersion learning experience to families new to America. Only English is spoken among students that represent 31 languages. 300 young people attend classes from elementary through high school for one year and then move into a regular school. The staff and teachers are extremely dedicated and the spirit of the place is positive and contagious. I personally have never been in such a supportive educational community.

The existing garden of vegetables, herbs and fruit bushes and trees has created a beautiful, productive and useful outdoor classroom. Teachers can bring their classes out to the garden where a gardener greets them and engages them in gardening work, skill-building, tasting, and building community. During their first year various families picked food from the garden and sold it at our Greensboro Curb Market. The garden won Greensboro Beautiful’s School Garden of the Year Award in spring 2008.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if every school had its own food garden and the students eat from it one or several times each week? It would require a joint effort of state and local officials, teachers and parents, and of course students. Just recently the Greensboro Children’s Museum began an Alice Waters' sponsored Edible Schoolyard, the first of its kind in the nation. Every year thousands of children will be exposed to and organic garden and taste fresh, local food. Let’s hope that this will generate enthusiasm for both home and school gardening. Your motto should be, “A garden in every school.”