Helping students learn gardening is fun and important
Published in the March 16- 29, 2016 issue of Morgan Hill Life
By Marty Cheek
Photo by Marty Cheek
From left, Donna Dicker and Betsy Ding, present a $600 check to Paula Scotney-Castle while Teresa Sermersheim announces the gift to students at P.A. Walsh STEAM Academy
A light rain came misting down on the playground of P.A. Walsh STEAM Academy for the 8:10 a.m. morning assembly. In front of the rows of lined-up students, Principal Teresa Sermersheim and parent Paula Scotney-Castle received a large mock-up check for $600 from South Valley Fleurs Garden Club members Betsy Ding and Donna Dicker. The money will go to build a tool shed for the school’s vegetable garden.
“It’s going to help us with being able to make the garden more efficient where we can have things in a shed and people can access the materials and they can be safe and dry and things like that,” Sermersheim said. “We have a lot of beds and thank goodness we have rain now. I thought it was kind of appropriate that it was misting a little bit when you came.”
The South Valley Fleurs is a nonprofit organization dedicated to help residents in Morgan Hill, San Martin, Gilroy, Hollister and San Juan Bautista learn how to grow better gardens and yards. Among its club activities is the EduGrow Planting to Learn Program, which helps fund local school gardens and agricultural education activities, among which is the money going to provide P.A. Walsh with a tool shed. Much of the money raised for this program comes from the annual springtime plant sale held at the downtown BookSmart store parking lot. This year, the sale will be held from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday April 9.
Helping students learn about gardening and how plants grow does make an impact on them, Sermersheim said. “What I like, too, when we’re able to show our students this kind of activity, they can see how the community is so much of a part of who we are,” she said. “When we can work together, that’s really a big part of it. When Paula told me about receiving this check, I said let’s do it in the morning so all our children can see us doing this.”
Photo courtesy South Valley Fleurs Club
Flowers grown by South Valley Fleurs volunteers sold at last year’s flower sale at BookSmart.
The students also learn about how to be generous through the P.A. Walsh garden, Sermersheim said. Some of the vegetables grown in the garden were donated to a local church to help low-income people, which impressed the South Valley Fleurs members in deciding on providing the educational grant to the school.
The garden also helps teach the students at P.A. Walsh how their lives are connected to something as tiny as a seed which, after being planted in the soil and receiving water, air and sunlight, grows into food that the students can eat — and learn about nutrition, too. The garden last year produced cabbages that were made into coleslaw, Sermersheim said.
“So many of our students had never tried coleslaw, so we got all of our cabbages — we had enough cabbage for 650 kids to have coleslaw — and put them into giant bowls and we were chopping up and getting the sauce just right. We had a giant butcher paper so the kids could write down what they thought about the coleslaw — like it was ‘tangy.’”
P.A. Walsh has the highest number of students in the district on free and reduced lunch programs, an indication of the high poverty rate among the families going to the school. Many of the students live in apartments so they don’t have a garden and haven’t been to places where they could learn about how food is produced. So the school garden is a good experience for the students to get their hands into the soil and connect with nature while they find a worm or two, Sermersheim said.
“We manage to take cabbage to a whole new level. It’s just a wonderful way to enrich the students’ lives,” she said.
The EduGrow program that provided the grant awarded to P.A. Walsh is open to all schools in the South Valley or San Benito County. The application process starts in September and the paperwork need to be submitted to the selection committee by Feb. 1 for EduGrow’s yearly cycle of grant awards. Besides P.A. Walsh, other schools that received the grants this year are Chamberlain’s Children Center in Hollister and Rucker Elementary School in Gilroy. Chamberlain’s is a school for challenged students who are under court-referrals and it is using its EduGrow grant money to develop lessons to help students equate the struggles of seedlings to the struggles children face.
“You can see how valuable those lessons are to children who have had difficulties,” Dicker said.
The South Valley Fleurs has about 60 members. It was chartered in 2001 and founded by Morgan Hill residents Irene Mort and Sally Bierdorff. It is a part of the Santa Clara Valley District of California Garden Clubs and, through that organization, is a member of the National Garden Clubs. The club’s present president is Susan Houghton and its vice president is Lisa Ruminski.
Dicker has been a member of the club for five years and said she joined to enhance her skills in growing flowers and other plants.
“I like gardening,” she said. “Betsy always makes things fun, and I’m a lifelong learner so I knew I needed to know about gardening for my own benefit.”
The club brings in many expert speakers to speak on gardening issues — topics ranging from Japanese flower arrangement to worm compositing — which makes it a fun way to learn gardening skills, Ding said.
“I enjoy the camaraderie of being there with people who also love gardening and are also learners,” she said. “We have one member who is a master gardener, so they come with different experiences and many of them have been garden club member for many years.”
Some of the members will come in to schools to help students with their campus garden on an advisory situation, but they will not do the actual work, Ding said. Members in the various communities have created projects in public venues. In Morgan Hill, the members planted a butterfly garden by Nordstrom Elementary School in Nordstrom Park to attract the winged creatures through specific plants and flowers they like to feed upon. Members are also involved in the adopt a planter program in downtown Morgan Hill, which plants Monterey Road planters four times a year with seasonal flowers donated by Dave Vincent from Morgan Hill’s Cal Color Growers. The members organize the volunteers to pick up the plants and plant them in the planter boxes. After the street construction in the downtown is finished, the club members will resume the program.
In Hollister, members are working on a community project that supports a fire-safe garden program. And members support a garden at the Gilroy Senior Center.
For Ding and Dicker, both retired school teachers, the EduGrow program is a favorite activity. Many of the club members grow vegetables and a wide selection of annual and perennial ornamentals that are sold at the BookSmart parking lot plant sale to raise funds for the program.
“We specialize in heritage tomato plants which our members grow from seeds and we have a variety of other plants grown from seed,” Dicker said.
About 30 varieties of heirloom tomato plants are sold, as well as peppers, cucumber, squash and herb seedlings. The tomato and other vegetable plants are sold for $3 each and prices for the ornamentals vary depending on size. Decorative flower pots, garden tools and yard accessories are also for sale. Customers can make their purchases with cash, personal check or credit card.
“I’ve really been excited as a member of the EduGrow committee to have worked with a couple of schools that have received our grants and it’s very exciting to see the connection that the teachers are making with curriculum,” Dicker said. “As a retired teacher, I think that’s the best of all worlds. Some children today never get to dig in the dirt and never get to see a worm, so we’re helping them to do that and it’s fun to be part of that.”
