School garden offers new kind of classroom

“Get your hands dirty my loves”

On a Tuesday afternoon, biology teacher Aimee Artigues asks her high school biology students to line up on either side of a long row of flowering plants in the Crested Butte Community School garden.

“Okay, kiddos,” Miss A shouts, “What kind of plants are these?”
“Beans!” shouts one student.
“Negative, batman.”
“Carrots!”
Wrong again, too. The thing is, I don’t know what kind of plant it is, either. Slender brown stalks rise up from the ground like someone stuck them there and adorned them with yellow flowers.
“Look at the base of the plant,” Miss A instructs her students. “What do you see? What kind of vegetable was this before it started to flower?”
I look down with the students, and for the first time notice purple-green leaves that look an awful lot like some kind of vegetable I’ve seen before—a type of chard, Miss A informs us, that has started to seed. That means it can no longer be eaten—but the seeds can be collected.
“Tomorrow you’re going to spend an hour collecting seeds with the little ones,” Miss A informs her class.
Her students pick pods off the plants, open them up to see what’s inside so they can teach the kindergarteners and first graders about seeds and plant parts. The biology class has taken over the weeding and harvesting of the Community School garden, started last spring by a group of students with help from teachers, the Mountain Roots Food Project and a few dedicated volunteers.
They weeded the garden over the summer, harvesting the vegetables ready before school had even started—produce that sold at the Farmers Market and put about $100 back into the garden fund.
“I spent most of the volunteer days in the garden, and I was actually surprised to find how big everything in the garden grew to be,” said student Rachel Creed. Teachers credit Creed, along with students Jackson Melnick and Josh Gallen, with being instrumental in making the garden happen.
Lettuce the size of large grapefruit, deep purple kale, flowering broccoli plants and the long, green shoots of onions have surprised everyone with their bounty.
When Miss A’s biology students scatter throughout the garden to harvest the kale and the onions, the vegetables come out of the ground with clumps of dirt clinging to their roots.
“Gently, gently, shake it,” Miss A coaches.
“Hey Miss A, this is a lot of dirt,” someone calls out.
“Get your hands dirty, my loves,” she calls back.
The biology class visits the garden four or five days a week for the first 20 minutes of class. They keep garden shoes in their lockers, harvest food straight from the ground and learn about the life cycles of plants. So far, they have delivered about 15 pounds of leafy greens like kale and lettuce and 20 pounds of root vegetables like carrots and beets. And that’s not including the basket overflowing with kale on this Tuesday afternoon.
“We haven’t turned anything away,” says kitchen manager Kathy Hecker.
She and the lunch staff have served middle school and high school students sides like roasted beets, and when there has been enough produce, served side salads to the whole school using lettuce and vegetables from the garden. When they do that, she says, they try to leave the carrots whole so the kids can see what they look like.
“They’re the funniest looking things, small but super flavorful,” she says.
And sure enough, a bowl of carrots in the cooler shows them to be the size of my thumb, pale orange with long, curling tendrils for tips. They remind me of carrots I ravaged out of my mother’s garden as a small child, making a “salad” of leaves of grass.
But then, that’s part of the goal—to see and taste what vegetables look like when they come out of your own backyard. Hecker and the lunch staff have plans to serve garden potatoes in breakfast burritos and steamed kale or kale chips as a side.
“Oh, kale chips are delicious!” an eighth grader exclaims, right as Kathy discusses the upcoming menus.
Of course, not every kid loves kale. In the garden, a few of Miss A’s students proclaim they won’t eat vegetables or even try the broccoli flowers Miss A pops into her mouth. But on the lunch trays, the side salads get tried and even get eaten. And for kids involved in the garden, teachers have observed a new openness to vegetables.
“Most of the kids involved are like, ‘Whoa! That’s the best carrot I’ve ever eaten,’” says math teacher Janae Pritchett, who helped the students get the garden started.
As the biology class heads back into the school, they pause just outside the door. An errant lettuce leaf gets tossed at somebody’s head, and Miss A reminds the class that they need to be quiet once back inside the school.
To Miss A, the benefits of the garden are clear. She has more requests from the elementary classes to spend time in the garden than she can accommodate, and working it into her curriculum has been a boon for her students.
“It gets them moving, it gets them outside, it gets them spending time with the elementary students. It’s a win-win all around,” she says.