Students, community tend garden at Ridgeway Community School
By Janet Kubat Willette
jkubat@agrinews.com
Date Modified: 07/01/2010 9:13 AM
E-mail article | Print version
RIDGEWAY, Minn. — Gardening is fun, Samantha Bunke said as she worked in the garden behind Ridgeway Community School.
The Ridgeway third grader helps her grandmother in the garden and this year is expanding her knowledge by participating in the garden club at Ridgeway Community School.
The club is tending a 20-foot by 40-foot plot behind the school, growing potatoes, tomatoes, radishes, pumpkins, cucumbers, lemon basil, torch tithonia (a Mexican sunflower) and king of the north (a sweet pepper) among other vegetables and a few flowers. Many of the vegetables will end up in lunches at Ridgeway Community School.
The garden started last fall when a sheet of black plastic was laid behind the school. This spring, the plastic was pulled back to reveal soil and yellow grass. The soil was worked with some well-composted manure from a neighboring farm and the first seeds were sown in the garden on May 6, said Caroline van Schaik, a Land Stewardship Project community based food systems organizer.
Van Schaik has worked with the school this year on its farm-to-school program. She foraged for local foods, worked on recipes, coordinated the garden and helped with sampling new foods in the school. Her efforts were paid for by a grant from the University of Minnesota Experiment in Rural Cooperation.
Van Schaik said the students gazed at seed catalogs last winter, selecting the seeds they wanted to plant when the snow melted.
She located the seeds and helped students start seeds in a grow lab donated to the school two years before by the master gardeners.
"I got to choose a sunflower and lemon basil," first grader Julia Maynard said. The basil will be used on pizza, in spaghetti and in salads, she said.
Her older brother, Ben, chose cucumbers and green beans. It was Ben's idea to grow food for the lunch room, van Schaik said.
Garden club members planted their first seeds indoors on April 5. The four-foot wide by two-foot deep grow lab was placed in the main hallway so everyone could see the progress. There were four shelves and four trays on each shelf. A watering schedule was posted with two students responsible for watering the plants each day. The lights were on a timer.
The students grew way more than they had room for in their garden, van Schaik said. Their extra plants were sold at a plant sale in May. Money raised will pay for lemonade for summer garden volunteers and also be seed money for next year.
Grant money funded this year's seed purchases, van Schaik said.
Volunteers will care for the garden this summer, she said. Some of the food harvested may go to the food shelf, teaching the students a lesson in sharing their bounty with others.
The students not only have had the experience of planning and planting a garden, but also the joy of eating the fruits of the garden. They harvested radishes and ate them fresh. They also served plum purple radishes to classmates and guests on the last day of school.
Students have tried buffalo burgers and blue corn chips, potatoes, tomatoes and squash. Zucchini was also served.
The school cook, Mary Carrie, served chocolate cupcakes with the zucchini as a secret ingredient as a birthday snack.
"They tasted better than any cupcake I'd ever had," Bunke said.
Zucchini was also served raw and baked with sautéed onions. The zucchini came from the winter production houses at Whitewater Gardens near Altura, van Schaik said.
They also served strawberries in June from a farmer in LaCrescent.
"We have really good lunches," Bunke said.
The Maynards will be one of the families tending the garden this summer. Ben and Julia's mother, Kristy, is one of the parent volunteers. Parent Alisa Hornberg and neighbor Lea Karlssen have also been instrumental to the project, van Schaik said.