Some people garden for the mental escape. Others want inexpensive access to quality vegetables. Braden Uhlmann does it for the dirt.
“It’s fun to get your hands messy,” the fourth-grader said while working in his school’s greenhouse this past week.
Braden and his classmates at Champlin-Brooklyn Park Academy for Math and Environmental Science were scooping soil from large bins and gingerly — sometimes not so gingerly — transferring the dirt to small plastic pots.
Then they sprinkled in seeds.
“We’re burying them alive,” 10-year-old Alex Novak yelled as he doused his container with a healthy serving of Alyssum seeds.
This innovative gardening program at the Anoka-Hennepin magnet school partners students with Hennepin County master gardeners to teach them about plant life, nutrition and basic food production.
It’s the only one of its type in the state, according to Denise Schnabel, curriculum integration coordinator at the school.
“A lot of our students don’t live in locations where they could even be exposed to gardening,” Schnabel said. “This exposes them to nature and how the world works in ways they might not get anywhere else.”
The program intensifies in fourth and fifth grade, when teachers blend gardening lessons in with the rest of the curriculum. Students learn about fractions by plotting out a garden design, for example. A science class focuses on soil testing.
They also spend an hour a month getting their tiny green thumbs dirty.
Students officially are certified “junior master gardeners” after completing the program in fifth grade.
A volunteer gardener held up a poster during the past week’s lesson on germination before breaking the children into small groups so they could do some planting.
“I didn’t know the soil went in first and then the seeds,” Braden said after dusting two tiny pots with winter squash and sweet corn seeds.
Alex gave his basil seeds a “medium chance” of survival.
Next month, the students will thin out their most successful seedlings and eventually transplant them to one of the school’s 11 raised beds, where they do routine watering and weeding before school let’s out in May.
Volunteers pick up where they left off over summer vacation, taking home whatever food the gardens bear.
Students handle the final harvest in the fall, serving up their finds at the school’s September open house.
“It really brings it full circle,” Schnabel said.
The program was brought to the building from Riverview Elementary at parents’ insistence after that school closed about four years ago.
“They were adamant it continue,” Schnabel said. “Our families love it.”
So does Dillan Deleon, who said the biggest challenge of her lesson was making sure all her itty-bitty seeds made it in to the pot.
The 10-year-old also offered up a pick for what vegetable she would be. “A tomato, because they’re yummy and grow fast and everyone in the world loves them,” she said.
Sarah Horner can be reached at 651-228-5539. Follow her at twitter.com/hornsarah.
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