Edible Season
Taking It Outside: Schools Grow Future Foodies and Gardeners By Shawndra Miller Photos By Christina Richey
It’s just after 3pm on an early June Friday, and the elementary school courtyard is filling up with energetic kids of varying ages. At the far end of a raised garden bed, pea vines twine up the salvaged box spring that serves as a trellis. In its shadow, a blond girl twirls on one foot in the gravel. Two boys kick a bottle cap between them; other children flip the pages of their new yearbooks. Irvington Community Elementary School (ICES) is one week away from summer break, and the students are buzzing with springfevered anticipation. But when Jennifer Smith, the eastside charter school’s health teacher, calls the school year’s last meeting of the garden club to order, everyone quiets down. “Raise your hand if you want to be in the garden club next year,” she says. Nearly every hand shoots up. It’s a welcome sight, given the number of youth who have never experienced the flavor burst of a homegrown tomato. The closest many children come is the ketchup on a French fry. In fact, Keep Indianapolis Beautiful’s Ginny Roberts, who works with many schools to develop garden programs, conducted an informal survey of several Indianapolis Public School middle school classes. Only five children out of some 600 had picked a ripe tomato off the vine. “I was just shocked,” she says. Rita Franco, a mother of four who has been heavily involved with the ICES garden club, says she knows firsthand how easy it is to fall into
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the fast-food trap, given the harried pace of life. That’s why she’s so passionate about the club. All four of her children take part, and she loves giving them the chance to experience what she calls “slower-paced food.” “My vision is to teach the kids where their food comes from,” she says, adding that all kids need to know the true-blue flavors of food cultivated in their own backyard or schoolyard.
Nurturing the seeds As the club members get ready to get to work, Smith tells them they can stop by anytime during the summer with their parents and pull a weed or give the plants a drink. With ICES doors opening for the new school year in late July, summer break is short. Smith is counting on this type of ad hoc involvement to keep the garden flourishing until the club resumes with the school year. The built-in reward is the harvest: “If there’s a red tomato, you can pick it and eat it, OK?” Then the group gets their marching orders for the next half hour: The fifth graders, top of the totem pole here, will bring wheelbarrowloads of bricks—eventually to border new beds—from the far side of the school lot. The first and second graders will tend to the seedlings along the back of the building. Hand tools emerge from backpacks as the kids scatter to their posts. Some attack weeds with gusto, whacking the dirt with garden forks to dislodge young thistles from the soil. The girl on hose duty, predictably, gets soaked. The fifth graders trundle into view, too many hands steering the tilting, overloaded wheelbarrow.
fall 2011
