COSTA MESA : Moppets See the Wonders of a Garden

Decked out in a Teen-age Mutant Ninja Turtles birthday hat and sweat pants, 5-year-old Carlos Castellanos swiped at a patch of weeds with his new green hoe. Then, bending over a foot tall squash plant, the swiping halted, and Carlos screamed for the others.

“Ladybug,” the cry went out, and four other preschoolers came running to examine the small, red specimen.

Carlos was one of 11 children working on the new children’s garden at Orange Coast College Friday morning. Started by a professor at the school about a month ago, the garden is now overseen by employees at the campus day-care center. And it is weeded, watered and harvested by the 120 children who spend their days at the children’s center.

Once it would have been a common sight in Orange County to see children playing around scarecrows, digging with small trowels and mashing pumpkin seeds into the ground. But with the age of housing developments and mini-malls, children don’t often get to play in gardens, said Lucy Groetsch, the assistant director for the Children’s Center at Orange Coast College.

“I think most of our population of children here live in apartments and condominiums and don’t have a chance to get out in the yard,” Groetsch said. “It’s always fascinating for children to discover that their food actually comes from the earth, not the supermarket. I think this kind of activity helps them assume some responsibility for the earth.”

The garden, about a quarter of a mile from the children’s center, is a half-acre patch now rich with squash, tomato, bean and corn plants. Until last summer the land was used by the college agriculture department to raise farm animals. When that program was abandoned, Prof. Jay Yett of the geology department began working on the idea of a children’s garden.

“They used to keep a lot of animals here, cattle and sheep, and the kids would come over a couple times a week to see them,” Yett said. “All we wanted was to make a garden that was large enough that they could see the plants and watch them grow.”

“If nothing else, they just get to walk and get away from all the hustle and bustle,” he said, nodding at the relative quiet of the garden in the middle of the Costa Mesa campus. “There’s really no other place nearby where the kids can get away. There’s not much land available anymore for all this.”