Posted on Tue, Jan. 01, 2008

It’s a windy, overcast morning better spent in cozy confines, but the second-graders in Maren Roedenbeck’s class are busy digging holes in a raised soil bed at Carlos Finlay Elementary in West Miami-Dade. With their garden gloves and spades they look — and perhaps even sound — like pros.”Holy moly! Look at this rock.”

“You gotta dig deeper.”

“Take it out of the container, dummy.”

Roedenbeck’s class is participating in Plant A Thousand Gardens Collaborative Nutrition Initiative, a pilot program at five Miami-Dade public schools that hopes to use edible gardens to teach children math, health, science, writing, social studies — and change their families’ eating habits along the way.

”A lot of these kids have never planted anything before,” Roedenbeck says. “But now they’re bringing seeds from home. They’re identifying vegetables in the cafeteria, and they’re also making better eating choices.”

And just being outdoors is fun. ”I enjoy getting my hands dirty,” says Lucia Nicole Nunez.

Chimes in Lourdes Carmen Perez: “Yeah, and now I recognize lettuce and peppers.”

But working in the garden is more than a chance to play in the dirt. After digging, planting and watering their radishes, lettuce, eggplant, cauliflower and other veggies, students return indoors to chart measurements in math class and write about their experiences in language-arts journals. In science they study plant anatomy

”Plants need good soil, lots of water and lots of sun,” explains Christopher Lara, ticking off the essentials for a good crop. “And then you have to wait to watch them grow.”

Gardens in education is not a new concept. For years schools have cultivated small beds in an effort to teach students about life sciences. But the Plant A Thousand Gardens initiative is more ambitious. Using a garden-to-table-to-compost approach, it hopes to combat childhood obesity and the health problems that stem from it by connecting kids to the process of food production.

The concept was first tested in six South Florida schools in 2004 by Slow Food Miami, an arm of the international movement to fight fast food and promote local culinary traditions. At that time community organizations donated materials and expertise to plant organic gardens modeled after renowned chef and cookbook author Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard program in California. Waters, who has spent the past three decades trying to promote locally grown food, established this public education program to involve students in the food cycle.

”We started with a small concept,” says Jo Anne Bander of Slow Food Miami. “It wasn’t yet about permanent change, and it wasn’t about trying to change eating habits.”

But the volunteer group was so pleased by the results from the first six schools that they approached The Education Fund, a nonprofit based in Miami that uses private-sector help to design and implement changes in public schools. The fund turned to the Health Foundation, which provided $200,000 in funding for two years.

Public school officials and The Education Fund selected five elementaries with high concentrations of Hispanic, Haitian and African-American students: Finlay, Charles R. Hadley in northwest Miami-Dade, Coral Park in Westchester, Caribbean in southwest Miami-Dade) and West Hialeah Gardens. Each school uses teams — two second-grade teachers and an administrator — to implement an interdisciplinary curriculum. About 240 students are participating.

Teachers also take a class called Action Research Study at Barry University to learn how to collect the data that will assess the effectiveness of the program: Are tests scores in science, reading and math improving as a result? Are the students’ eating habits changing?

This research and the interdisciplinary curriculum distinguish Plant A Thousand Gardens from other school garden programs, says Linda Lecht, president of The Education Fund.

”Ultimately we hope to have a model so every school can do this,” she says. “We want to have the research to prove its effectiveness.”

In the first year, each school receives $2,500 for garden supplies, cooking demonstrations, parent workshops and research needs. Another $400 is applied to field trips. Parental involvement is essential, says Peter Uttal, the school curriculum support specialist who oversees the program. “We want to train kids, teachers and parents to advocate for better nutritional choices. But in the end it’s the parents who buy the food.”

At Coral Park Elementary, Christine Pascual regularly helps her daughter Victoria Fernandez work in the garden. Her family is even talking about planting an herb garden. ”The only vegetable my husband eats is corn,” Pascual says with a laugh, “but at least Victoria now likes broccoli. She’s making the connection between what they’re planting and what they’re eating.”

Victoria often returns home from school full of stories about their adventures in the garden, and Pascual plans to participate in cooking workshops once the vegetables are harvested.

”I hope she appreciates what it takes to grow food,” Pascual says. “It doesn’t come from Winn-Dixie.”

Part of the program also includes school visits by experts. On a recent Wednesday morning, organic farmer Drew Hart of Paradise Farms in Homestead talked to Caribbean Elementary second-graders about soil, bugs and his job in an industry few students consider as a career. It was his first visit, so he asked them to pick through the soil in their garden to find something interesting, a lesson they did with great cheer and alacrity.

”They’re excited to meet a live farmer because they usually don’t know any,” Hart explains. “But they’re really most excited about the concept of growing food. They learn pretty quickly the difference between fruits and vegetables and what part of the plant they’re eating.”

The lessons blooming in a garden extend beyond the classroom. The kids have learned — the hard way — that plants don’t grow overnight no matter how much you watch them.

”I have learned to be patient,” says Na Young Shin, a second-grader at Finlay Elementary. “It takes a while for the plants to grow.”