Why try to explain miracles to your kids when you can just have them plant a garden? ~Robert Brault
At the moment, the vegetable gardens at Worton Elementary and Chestertown Middle schools look like everyone else’s – slightly disheveled and unproductive. (Actually, blanketed last night by four inches of snow, they now look like a picture postcard.). Yet despite appearances, they are just waiting for this coming season’s growth.
These two school gardens, spearheaded by Master Gardener Sabine Harvey, are something of a gift to the children and the school community. The work to create and maintain them is an example of love made visible.
“I started the elementary school garden two years ago because that’s my passion,” Harvey explains, “and that seemed like a logical place to put a garden. It’s right there with the high school, the elementary school and the community center, which makes it very visible. And there are lots of people who can benefit from this garden.”
The middle school garden was begun last year at the behest of Chestertown Middle School social studies teacher, Ed Stack. Stack heads Discover Corps, a service-oriented after-school program whose projects include the food pantry and the Lions Club Christmas baskets. Many food pantry projects garner only prepared foods; recipients rarely get fresh fruits and vegetables.
“Ed said, ‘Let’s start a garden to give to the food pantry and to give our own kids more fruits and vegetables,’” Harvey says.
“I’d been wanting to do a garden out here for a while,” Stack says. “But when I mentioned it to Sabine, she was all over it.”
In addition to giving healthy produce to the food drives, both Stack and Harvey, an extension agent with University of Maryland’s Grow It Eat It program, envisioned it as a way to offer kids a taste of the many lessons a vegetable garden can teach — healthy nutrition, patience, the satisfaction of working toward a less-than-immediate reward, teamwork, confidence and self-sufficiency.
Harvey got a grant to cover the cost of fencing to protect the garden from marauding rabbits, which can decimate crops overnight. Volunteers from Washington College and the community joined to construct the fencing and build the raised, boxed-in beds. The kids helped the construction, then dug beds, spread compost, mulched and planted everything. The result far surpassed Stack’s original hopes.
“It was amazing!” he says. “I was thinking: sand castle; and Sabine made the Taj Mahal!”
The students also squashed plenty of unwanted bugs, though they were careful to distinguish between pests and pollinators, lessons in biology and ecology. The garden’s produce — ‘tons’ of tomatoes, watermelons, lettuce basil, potatoes, cucumbers, peppers, soy beans, beans, onions — went to the food pantry and the Lions Club Christmas baskets, some of whose beneficiaries are the same kids who created and maintained the garden.
Harvey has big plans for this coming year’s garden. She expects to get a jump on the season this year with early spring crops — last year’s garden wasn’t even begun until June. She also wants to expand the garden’s benefits.
“I want to integrate the garden more into school as a whole. We hope to have family picnics, some cooking days and I’d like for kids who come to enter stuff in the Kent County Fair,” she says. “And I’m going to introduce floating row covers for integrated pest managedment [IPM]. It will be a demo site for other people too.”
This year, they also hope to have a water line installed. Last year, watering was difficult since they had to snake 400 feet of hoses from a leaking spigot to the garden. The total cost of the project — water line, trenching, PVN pipe, standpipe below-frost spigot — has been estimated to cost $2500.
Donations, some of which have already come in as a result of letters Stack sent out, are welcome. Contact Ed Stack, Chestertown Middle School, 410-778-1771.
Unemployment is capitalism’s way of getting you to plant a garden. ~Orson Scott Card
Annie says
This is such an exciting project! Huge kudos to Ed and Sabine for getting it off the ground (or perhaps I should say *in* the ground). It’s win-win-win-win for the kids, the school, the community, and those who directly benefit from receiving the fresh produce. This sort of undertaking makes me hopeful and happy. Thank you, Sabine and Ed, for your energy and inspiration. I wish you bumper crops this year!