Gardening : ‘Angels’ Help Tend an Urban Oasis
The 10th Street Elementary School near downtown Los Angeles is surrounded by a neighborhood where drugs spread like weeds.
But at the corner of 11th Street and Union Avenue is a fenced-in strip of land where third-graders learn there’s more to their turf than drug trafficking and graffiti.
The children in this oasis find a sense of security and someone to watch over them, like guardian angels. Actually, gardening angels.
The Gardening Angels is a volunteer group initiated by UC Cooperative Extension’s Common Ground, which targets areas in the Los Angeles Unified School District. The program’s goal is to match volunteers who have home gardening experience with children who may be more apt to believe that vegetables grow on market shelves.
The 10th Street third-graders work in a corner of the community garden near the school on land owned by the Community Redevelopment Agency.
They spend one hour a week during the school year in the garden, marveling that the tiny seeds they bury in the ground will, in time and with a little care and water, sprout and grow into flowering plants or vegetables--and maybe even provide food for their families’ tables.
Common Ground has been planting gardening programs in inner-city schools for about 12 years. The Gardening Angels idea took root recently because Common Ground hasn’t been able to meet the demand from schools wanting gardens, nor provide follow-up assistance to those that have them.
“The volume of requests (for help) is overwhelming,” says Rachel Mabie, youth coordinator for Common Ground.
“We can work with only five to 10 schools a year. With Gardening Angels, we hope to reach more. The goal for this year is 20 schools, maybe more, depending on how many volunteers we get.”
Gardening Angels not only help teachers and students plan gardens, but also work one-on-one with students, teaching them soil preparation, weeding, watering and harvesting.
“When teachers try to do gardening all on their own,” says Mabie, “it’s just too chaotic with 30 kids. We want to make it more than just an extra recess.”
The children aren’t the only ones who get something out of these vegetation collaborations, Mabie says.
“Volunteers seem to find the experience very rewarding,” she says. “Gardeners are a rare breed. They’re enthusiastic about their hobby, and they share that excitement of planting a seed and watching it grow with the kids.”
How do you get 30 energetic third-graders excited about agriculture? It doesn’t take much--they seem more than happy to learn about gardening in plots that look a lot like big sandboxes.
In the community garden on Union Street, 8- and 9-year-olds huddle near the edges of the plots to tend radishes, lettuce, carrots and other vegetables, in addition to fruit trees and shrubs.
“Gardening really reinforces a lot of things kids learn in the classroom,” Mabie says. “Gardening Angels is geared toward that--to use gardening as a tool in the curriculum.”
Mabie says teachers can use the gardening experience in teaching language and math--such as measuring the planting spaces and making graphs that show plant growth, or figuring out how much lettuce it would take to feed their families.
Chris Kealy, a 22-year-old volunteer at the 10th Street garden who is joining the Peace Corps, says he’s getting a lot of useful experience working with the kids.
“They’re a bit overanxious. They want to plant everything as soon as they get here,” Kealy says, adding that children are well-suited for the challenge. “Gardening is kind of a natural thing for kids; they do well out here--especially digging in the dirt.”
Growing plants is new to some of the children, many of whom live in apartment buildings where there is little room for plants and trees, let alone a vegetable garden. “Sometimes they don’t realize where fruits and vegetables come from,” Kealy adds.
Eight-year-old Rene Flores, egged on by his giggling buddies to talk about his gardening experience, said proudly: “Today I planted something round and red.”
A radish, his teacher clarified.
Even if students don’t always get the plant names right, they almost always get a feeling of accomplishment when the seeds they have planted sprout from the soil. Sometimes the effects are long-lasting.
“Kids tell me they went home and started a garden, or at the very least planted some seeds in a pot,” Mabie says.
Although Common Ground administers the Gardening Angels program, other groups that have contributed to its creation include L.A. Beautiful, the Los Angeles State and County Arboretum, University of California Master Gardeners and the Southern California Horticultural Institute.
“L.A. is a gardener’s paradise,” Mabie says. “There are so many gardeners here and so many children, I don’t think it should be that difficult to match them up.”
Volunteers need to be gardeners first; next, they must enjoy working with children. The volunteers will receive two days of training in teaching and working with children, including those with disabilities, beginning Tuesday and Feb. 20 from 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.
“Over the years we’ve worked with a lot of handicapped children and they respond very well,” Mabie says. “They often feel a real lack of self-esteem and a sense of inadequacy. When they plant a seed, watch it grow and harvest its fruit, it gives them a real feeling of satisfaction, like, ‘I can succeed just like anybody else.’ ”
For information on the Gardening Angels volunteer program, call Common Ground at (213) 744-4349.
