Daily Hampshire Gazette
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Tastes of home: School's garden becomes centerpiece
for lessons on food
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WILLIAMSBURG - Their plates heaped with spicy salsas, homemade pizza, pumpkin
muffins and pasta with pesto, a group of boys sat down to enjoy their feast.
"We love the pesto," said Marcus, a fifth-grader at the Anne
T. Dunphy School in Williamsburg. "And we've already had it lots of times
before."
That's because the pesto's basil and garlic come from the Williamsburg
elementary school garden which sits just to the east of the playground at the
Helen E. James School.
The harvest feast the boys downed Friday is part of a year-round garden
program that is serving up lessons as well as food. Other offerings on the
menu, including popcorn and squash pie, for example, also contained ingredients
from the school garden.
All students, grades pre-kindergarten through 6, participate in the
program. They learn to appreciate the benefits of locally grown products and
develop early on a willingness to try different tastes, said Catherine
Sands, a parent and lead organizer.
They even take bites of raw garlic, said Sands, and they know that if
they don't like something, they can put it in the compost pile.
About four years ago, Sands and former kindergarten teacher Sherrie
Marti started an after-school organic teaching garden project for Marti's
class.
Sands, an environmental organizer, now runs what grew out of that first
venture in 2003: Fertile Ground. The organization connects urban and rural
communities through the culture of agriculture. It partners with schools,
school districts, local businesses, community groups, youth and farmers. The
primary collaborator is Nuestras Raices, an economic and community development
organization in Holyoke that has a bakery and community garden.
Williamsburg students learn gardening techniques from the youth farmers
of Nuestras Raices and participate in Puerto Rican cultural exchanges as well,
said Sands.
Every fall, Fertile Ground holds an annual harvest feast featuring
dishes made by each class. The meal uses produce from the garden, said Sands,
so children are able to experience the entire process of food production,
including harvesting the vegetables and learning to cook with them in the
classroom.
And every day in the cafeteria, students reap the benefits of their
gardening knowledge. Food service staff at the elementary schools now serve
food from the garden, said Sands, and try to buy food from local farms.
First, they work
Friday's feast was preceded by some needed manual labor in the garden.
Overseen by educator Hope Guardenier of Holyoke, who has led the
hands-on classroom gardening curriculum for four years, students and parents
pushed wheelbarrows of mulch between raised beds, weeded, staked and collected
grubs.
Ellie Brasil of Haydenville took care of mulching fruit trees while she
watched her daughter, Isadora Brasil, a fourth-grader, hammer in a long stake.
Gary Kuntz, father of a first-grader, attacked the strawberry bed weeds, the
toughest job of the day, said Guardenier. The beds were overrun with weeds
because bees had been living under the plants up until the recent frost and the
area had been avoided.
The outdoor classroom - a set of tree-stump seats arranged in a circle
- was for the moment empty except for a basin of green cherry tomatoes.
"Pick some arugula and sorrel," advised Guardenier to parent
Chris Lioce, who looked momentarily confused. Her fifth-grade daughter, Siena
Burgess, loped over and was able to identify both plants by tasting them. They
filled a bowl and carried it inside for nibbling.
Sherrie Marti, now a speech and language specialist, called the workers
out of the garden at 4 p.m., explained how the feast worked - all the dishes
are labeled with ingredients - and then pointed the way to the door.
The long line for food snaked through the middle corridor of the James
School. A crowd of 60 or so parents and students had time to observe exhibits
that lined the hallway. There were slideshows that depicted visits to local
farms - a key part of Fertile Ground's goal of connecting farmers to teachers
and students - and photo albums of worm discoveries. Other exhibits offered
information about seed sales and cookbook sales, both fundraisers to help make
the program self-sustainable. "Every class has a different project,"
said Sands.
What's next for Fertile Ground? Will other students soon be enjoying
healthier home-grown lunches and developing spice-savvy students?
Sands said she's in discussions about expanding the program to other
local schools.
Deborah Doulette can be reached at dowendoulette@comcast.net.