School veggie garden offers kids another way to grow 

Schoolwork can be a hard row to hoe for students at Fishburn Park Elementary School. Literally.

Fishburn Park is well known in Roanoke for its environmental programs, which include the school’s own vegetable garden, where students dig, hoe, rake, plant and learn.

They learn how food grows from moist, rich soil. They plant seeds, pull weeds and pick some of the early crops. The kids who continue working in the garden during the summer hold a vegetable sale, at which they hone math, communication and people skills.

And they learn a little bit about failure.

“The first year of the sale, we had one head of cabbage and six tomatoes,” said school Principal Judy Lackey.

Gardening is hard. And fun.

“You actually get outside,” fifth-grader Simran Drakeford exclaimed as she and schoolmates left their classrooms and planted corn, potatoes, onions and beans last week.

A few minutes later, another girl screamed.

“It’s a grub!” she yelled.

Getting outdoors, playing in dirt and looking at bugs. Gardening sounds pretty cool.

Farming is not gardening

Gardening was not so cool when I was kid, for one simple reason: I grew up on a farm. Gardening was not a fun way to get off the couch and away from “Gilligan’s Island” reruns. It was hard labor.

Picking a mess of green beans in your 10-by-4-foot backyard garden in the heart of the city is a nice distraction from life in the asphalt jungle. But on a farm, bean-picking time meant being hunched over a row that seemed to continue until it disappeared over the horizon into a wave of heat devils. Cucumbers were no easier to pick and they had prickles.

Standing on the tractor plow to weigh it down as it tilled up new potatoes was fun, I reckon, but there is probably a law against that kind of thing now.

My parents would surely guffaw at my sad tales from the garden, because, truthfully, they did most of the work. It was probably more relaxing for them to just let me watch “Gilligan’s Island” rather than deal with my whining.

The food chain

Most kids don’t grow up on farms, obviously, which is why teaching them about gardening has become increasingly important, childhood experts and gardening aficionados say. In today’s pre packaged, fast-food world, many kids have little understanding of where food comes from. Fewer kids have relatives who farm or grow food for themselves.

“You ask second-graders where food comes from and they say, ‘It comes from the grocery store,’ ” said Amber Wilson, an extension agent who oversees the 4-H program in Franklin County.

“We want students to know that there is a connection between farm and table.”

Wilson oversees a couple of gardens at Franklin County schools, where kids grow and eat their own food. You want Junior to eat his vegetables? Have him help in the garden, Wilson said.

“Kids are more likely to try the foods they grow,” she said. “If those kids planted carrots, they’d be more likely to taste them and say they’re good even while they’re making a face.”

Wilson said that gardening can improve children’s nutrition, which could help alleviate the problem of childhood obesity. Another way gardening assists in that battle is by providing exercise.

Mark Powell, director of the Roanoke Community Garden Association, said families get a workout in the garden. Anybody who has dealt with a sore back after a day of digging knows how physically demanding gardening is.

Powell oversees an organization that tends four community gardens in Roanoke and built a fifth at Hurt Park Elementary School. He said many children help their families work in the gardens, and many of those families are immigrants and refugees who have long grown their own food.

Reaping what they sowed

Back at Fishburn Park, fourth-graders Jazlyn Moock and Reagan Crowder gently placed red kernels of corn in a skinny trench.

Jazlyn’s family lives outside Fishburn Park’s attendance zone, but her family applied for her to go to school there because of its environmental emphasis. The school has received between 50 and 200 applications each of the past four years from families who want their kids at Fishburn Park.

“I wanted to be here because of the gardening,” Jazlyn said. “It’s kind of a hobby.”

Outside the garden’s wooden fence, Simran and her fifth-grade classmates Christopher Williams, Madison Worstell and David Nguyen sliced up seed potatoes, which included some blue potatoes. David said he worked in the garden last year and even sampled the produce.

“We ate the lettuce,” he said.

How was the lettuce?

“It was decent,” he said.

Even better than what you can find in the grocery store.

Ralph Berrier Jr.’s column runs every other Monday in Extra.

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