Win-win for kids, community
Published in The Mammoth Times on August 4, 2022
Over summer break, teachers, students, and community members installed four new garden beds at Lee Vining Elementary and Middle School. The idea of an elementary school garden has been brainstormed and dreamed of for some time now, and the bed installation was one step towards making that idea finally tangible.
Led by middle school science teacher Yvette Garcia, the main goals of the gardening initiative center around students learning — about science, about art, about animals, about nutrition, about wellbeing.
“I just see so many possibilities,” said Garcia.
Today, look behind the Kindergarten classroom, and you’ll see the start of those possibilities in four 4×12, two-foot-deep raised garden beds, all of which are filled with rich soil that will soon be ready to be planted.
The town of Lee Vining already hosts one community garden, which has provided opportunities for hands-on learning throughout the past. The proximity of this new garden at the Elementary School, though, will give teachers more autonomy in easily incorporating it into daily lessons.
Part of the motivation behind this new project is that teachers at the school, which ranges from Kindergarten to eighth grade, will be able to find a number of creative ways to integrate the garden into their class curriculums.
“Anything that has to do with plants, people will be able to come out here and have flowers, leaves, and root systems,” said Garcia. She said she could imagine teachers having their classes take soil samples, learning about plant life cycles, learning about the way that roots work, understanding how flowers reproduce, trying different types of healthy food, and much more.
“You could do dissections of leaves, you could do leaf prints, you could do art. In life science, when you’re learning about photosynthesis, you can extract chlorophyll from a leaf, and you could come get leaves from here,” she said. “In things like that, I see an integration.”
Lee Vining Elementary and Middle School principal Jeanne Sassin also spoke on the diversity of ways in which having an onsite garden can help facilitate learning. “I like the fact that the garden is going to be incorporating science and nutrition into the lessons, because then that helps kids with their overall health,” she said. “Post-pandemic, and also with all the disruptions going on in our society, it’s really nice for us to have something that brings our school community together. It helps with our social and emotional learning, which also helps with our academics.”
As of now, Garcia hopes that each class will take on one section of the four beds and decide how it can best be used for their learning. But due to the Eastern Sierra’s harsh growing climate, these decisions will likely all fall under the same umbrella of growing season and plant options.
“[For] kids to grow and eat in the timeframe of the school year, they’re going to have to plant specific things, like leafy greens, or zucchinis,” she said. With these types of plants, classes will be able to plant in the last few weeks of school, and then return in the fall to weed and harvest them. In addition, students would be able to “start” plants by planting and taking care of them inside the classroom before transferring them into the garden beds. Other plants that will grow well in the garden throughout the year, Garcia said, could include salad greens, tomatoes, small pumpkins, sunflowers, and other kinds of flowers.
This variety of naturally grown foods is another part of the garden’s value, those who helped design and prepare it say. Garcia studied alternative agriculture and has worked at bringing fresh food to town through the community garden and market before becoming a teacher, so the importance behind this idea is central to her perspective. She says that showing kids healthy eating habits and how to grow food is especially important in a rural area where it can be difficult to find fresh, healthy food.
“It’s just exposure. If you know where your food comes from, and you’re familiar with it, you’re just going to be a more thoughtful consumer in the future,” she said. “That’s really my ulterior motive, is just giving people the opportunity to learn about where their food comes from, and have that joy of picking a carrot and eating it and tasting the difference, and also learning about growing food without chemicals. That’s where our world needs to go, right?”
The garden has been funded by a grant from Community Connections, an organization that facilitates grants that have to do with USDA and CalFresh, in addition to grants from the DeChambeau Creek Foundation and Lee Vining PTO. Volunteer work was also integral in developing the project. Several volunteer work party events at the school provided the manpower to move soil, construct the beds, and lay gravel, during the months of June and of July.
“It was fun… it was really neat for us to work together to do this. Everyone was really positive about it,” said Garcia.