Helping young minds grow

One of the most enjoyable and challenging aspects of being a Silicon Valley Health Corps member is exposing children to the miraculous transformation from seed to vegetable to delicious meal. Ask children where their food comes from and they will be more likely to say from the supermarket than from the ground. The children of Rock Springs neighborhood have read about the plant cycle in science textbooks but have never witnessed the process and certainly do not make the connection between the seeds in the ground and the food on their table. Many of them live in apartment buildings and have never had an opportunity to garden on their own. I started Garden Club at History Park with them in mind.

My hope was that by bringing them to the garden and involving them in every aspect of food production, they could gain some insight into the complex relationships that underlie our lives and our environment. Every week, we discuss a different topic in food production and perform a related activity in the garden. The children tend to squirm in their seats during the discussion portion, anxiously awaiting the moment where they get to pick up their tools and tend to their young plants. Although the children struggle to understand the benefits of composting and the intricacies of our food system, they derive great pleasure from sorting through worm castings and watering their seedlings. While I would like to get a bigger message across, I think that creating a positive association with growing vegetables and being outside is an equally valuable outcome.

Learning about Loam

In one HEAL lesson, our second grade students learned about the three types of soil--clay, sand, and loam--and that we want good quality loam soil, with lots of living material from compost, in order to grow huge, healthy vegetables and fruits in our raised garden beds. That is, regretfully, not the current state of our beds, especially since March, when we had heavy, soaking rains for 28 out of 31 days.

The next week, while re-digging and amending our hardened garden beds, we decided to add coconut coir. In each class, we discussed the sustainability of coconut coir compared to peat moss, that it is a by-product of the coconut industry (and therefore re-used instead of being thrown away), and that it is "crumbly, not sticky" and will therefore help keep the high concentration of clay soil in our beds from creating a hard, quick-drying mass that the plant roots will not thrive in. Then, to demonstrate the water-carrying capacity of this soil amendment, I grabbed a softball-sized lump of the well-soaked coir, and asked the students how we want soil to handle water.

"Like a sponge, keeping the roots moist but not soaked," they replied. Such good learners! I asked them to watch while I squeezed the coir over our soil bed. Nearly three cups of water streamed down into the garden beds. "WHOA!" they exclaimed.

"So, do you think this will help our plants grow in the garden?" I asked.

"YEAH!" was the emphatic reply. They were excited to add in the new organic matter and, with much gusto, finished preparing the beds for the next week's planting. I was just as excited to see they are getting hands-on garden experience to go with our (also hands-on) classroom lessons.