2nd Place Organic Silver Award
Seth Boyden Elementary
Maplewood, New Jersey

Seth Boyden Elementary is a Title 1 school located in densely populated Essex County, New Jersey — an area of diminishing green spaces. Since our gardens were created three years ago through joint efforts of parents, teachers, children, and school staff, they have become an exciting and beloved part of school life. Each class has access to one or two six-foot-square garden beds to plant and tend however they choose. This is the story of the gardens of two multiage classes (first and second graders) and what we did with them.

Our school year began with harvesting the summer crops in our class garden square. We measured the height of prize sunflowers, gathered zinnias, marigolds, and amaranth to display and tomatoes and herbs to cook in class celebrations, and collected seeds for planting next year.

But this was just the beginning! Next we prepared the soil for fall planting. Though our school is in northern New Jersey, we thought we could plant a fall garden of lettuces, radishes, cabbages, and kale, and enjoy fresh greens for Thanksgiving! The children searched seed catalogs for frost-resistant varieties with names like January King and Four Seasons. We planted a "Garden Quilt," with a tic-tac-toe pattern of radishes and nine different types of greens in each square.

The parents who attended our Thanksgiving feast could not believe the way their children were gobbling up salad greens and sautéed kale! We kept harvesting until the ground froze. Every time we pulled up a radish, we popped a small flowering bulb in its place to cheer us up in early spring. By the time our bulbs were blooming, it was time to plant peas! Meanwhile the Tom Thumb lettuce and arugula were growing again, so we had more salads to eat and share. After pea harvest, it was time to start our warm-season crops again. We transplanted the dormant spring bulbs to a place where they could grow undisturbed and planted pumpkins, corn, watermelon, dinosaur gourds, and our favorite…sunflowers.

Through the year children were involved in all aspects of garden design and maintenance. They used scale drawings of plants and garden space to map alternative garden layouts, debated the relative advantages of different designs, and voted to select the favorite. Harvesting and soil preparation were festive, with the whole class and many parents working together. Planting, weeding, watering, and pest inspection were accomplished by children working in pairs or small teams. Over the summer families took turns tending the garden, and often gathered there to work, play, and picnic.

Gardening enhanced every aspect of our curriculum. Math acquired purpose when it was embedded in the measurement and counting activities of gardening. New readers and writers were inspired not only to listen to stories and poems about the garden, but to compose their own. Favorite art lessons — such as painting sunflowers in the style of Van Gogh — happened here. Science became real and important for children when it involved organisms they could touch and take care of, and problems they cared about solving. (Why didn’t those beets grow? What made that pumpkin vine die?) Planting in the fall gave children an especially clear understanding of plant life cycles, because they could follow a plant "from seed to seed," over the course of the school year with no summer interruption.

Many children at our school have had a very urban existence, with no previous experience of working with plants or soil. Many began the year very fearful of bees, worms, caterpillars, and getting their hands dirty. By the end of the year, they were gardening with gusto, munching on mint leaves and sun-warmed strawberries, and defending the importance of bees to playground friends. We feel organic gardening helps kids not only to understand the web of life, but also to find their own place in it.