Big Apple Edibles, Inc.

Teachers love their work. It’s challenging and rewarding.
Recently, and with growing enthusiasm, teachers around the
country have been discovering a new resource: vegetable
gardens.
Requiring only soil, water and a little know-how, school
gardens support lessons in science, math, social studies,
language and any other topic you can name. As a bonus,
healthful eating and environmental appreciation are imbued
in every lesson.
These are sights to behold: 30 eighth graders using the
scientific method to analyze sugar content in heirloom
lettuce varieties, a Special Education class exploring
sensory observations in an herb garden, a Social Studies
class grinding wheat into flour for their segment on Native
American heritage. A small garden goes a long way when
productivity in learning is measured.
Garden-incorporated curriculum takes place on any schedule
that suits a class, from once a week to every day. Students
are greeted with a different experience each time. Activities
can be as basic as measuring the height of corn plants each
week or as complex as deciphering the Fibonacci sequence
in sunflower seeds’ pattern by eye. For creative teachers, the
sky’s the limit. Some ideas I’ve seen in action:
• Middle-school math classes use compasses and
calculators to document plants’ angles and lines, then
spend the week using that data to explore geometry or
algebra. No extra tools are needed, and the class might
even see a pollinator or two.
• A social studies class might track the growth and harvest
quantity of corn or rice, as societies all over the world rely
on staple crops like these. Back in the classroom, they can
explore the crop’s history in detail: Pharaohs in ancient
Egypt held power by storing grain, China’s enormous
stores of rice have carried it and its neighbors through
several droughts. recent use of corn for bio-fuels have
affected Mexican peasants’ food supply and so on.
• High school journalism students interview their
classmates as they plant and water, learning skills of
investigation and publishing while keeping the rest of the
school up to date on the garden’s growth. The season’s first
tomato or a sparrow perched on a sunflower offers eyecatching
headlines and beautiful photos.
• American History teachers can use gardens to bring to
life the work of historical figures like George Washington
Carver (1864-1943), the black inventor born of slave parents
who went on to attend college, introduced crop rotation
to the U.S. Congress and developed over 200 uses for the
peanut, revolutionizing perceptions of African-Americans
long before the civil rights movement.
These gardens are not without challenges. Urban schools
encounter soil toxins, extreme heat and vandalism. (Solutions:
compost, water and fences.) Rural schools battle deer and
deep shade. (Solutions: fences and shade-tolerant plants like
lettuce and kale.) Watering often falls to a custodian or
devoted teacher, coming in early each day to check on the
plants.
But supportive resources are growing fast. Teachers can
consult the many books on organic gardening to get a sense
of what to expect, such as regional planting schedules and
harvest guides. Foundations and agencies offer grants for
schools to build an educational vegetable garden on site.
Local botanical and community gardens welcome class trips,
giving students and teachers a taste of gardening.
I have been doing this for many years, and I’ve never seen
a kid go home unchanged. My favorite quote, from a fourth
grader in the Bronx: “I thought this trip was going to be
boring, but it was great!” They love it even more than the
adults do. And with the right mix of soil, food, conversation
and earthworms, the experience will last them for the rest of
their very long, very healthy lives.
***
Rachel Franz is an environmental entrepreneur living
in Brooklyn, NY. She has been gardening and farming
organically for nearly a decade, including farms in upstate
New York and Costa Rica. She leads gardening workshops
for children and teachers at the New York Botanical Garden.
She is also co-founder of Big Apple Edibles, Inc., an urban
gardening business based in New York City. For more
information or a free consultation, contact her at
info@bigappleedibles.com.