Sowing Seeds of Ambition : Education: Jack Gray is using Peary Middle School’s gardening program to teach students how to take pride in their work.
For this gardening teacher, using the carrot means feeding students radishes on the first day of class.
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Radishes? Don’t kids hate radishes?
Jack Gray, the gardening teacher at Peary Middle School in Gardena, insists that radishes do the trick.
“What I do is make it into a ceremony almost,” Gray said. “I wash them off so that they look beautiful, and I dip one into a bowl of my secret-formula ranch dressing. If you get them to try it out, you’ve usually got them hooked.”
And since radishes reach maturity in only 28 days, Gray said, students in a relatively short time can produce a food they sampled on the first day of class.
Not that radishes are Peary’s only produce. In the school’s gardening program, 350 students each year use a three-acre lot to grow corn, onions, beets, broccoli, strawberries and other vegetables and fruits.
The students take most of the food home. If there’s a bumper crop, as with this year’s corn, they’ll sell it to make money for Gray’s after-school garden club. In October, for instance, students harvested 80 rows of corn and sold half of it, making about $150, Gray said.
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The ambitious gardening program has historical roots. Once a thriving farming town noted for its strawberry patches, Gardena has had school gardening programs for decades. Peary is one of only a handful of middle schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District whose gardening program remains.
That pleases students such as Binh Tran, 13, who is taking Gray’s class for the second year.
“I like being outdoors playing with plants,” Tran said. “I’ve learned how to plant in a big space, and I’ve learned the names of plants.”
Tran’s favorite spot on the lot is Shibusa, a Japanese garden with a man-made pond and exotic trees and plants. Shibusa, which means peace and tranquillity, got started in the mid-1960s but later fell into a state of neglect. Three years ago, Gray and his students, with the help of the Gardena Valley Gardeners’ Assn., began restoring it.
Purple-leaf maple trees, ginko trees, Japanese maple, bamboo trees, and several bonsai trees adorn Shibusa. A waterfall and several species of flowers add to the serenity. The pond teems with koi, colorful fish valued for centuries as pets in Asia.
“The kids like Shibusa, and they’re a lot calmer when they’re in there,” Gray said. “They have respect because they’ve worked on it--they own a piece of it.”
Gray believes that if students can take pride in their accomplishments, they will work hard willingly. And in his class, there is plenty of hard work to do. Students immerse themselves in all aspects of gardening, from weeding to watering to spreading fertilizer.
Some of Gray’s students liked the class so much they joined his after-school garden club and his advanced gardening class.
Advanced class and garden club students also take part in special projects. For the last two years, for example, Gray has been piling up dirt in the northwest corner of the lot that faces Normandie Avenue, a main thoroughfare.
The mound, now five feet high, will be planted with flowers that will spell out Peary Middle School. Palm trees, which the students recently planted, will also decorate the mound. Determined to get the trees just right, Gray has had the students replant them twice.
The fine-tuning, he says, is worth the effort. Said Gray: “They’re going to see this when they drive by every day.”
On a warm, sunny day recently, one group of kids worked on the mound while another readied the soil for snow peas. They used one of their favorite tools, the hula hoe, a special hoe for removing weeds. They like it, Gray said, because it swivels--or hulas--back and forth.
Kellon Holloway, 13, sang a rap song as he toiled. Gray spotted a few kids perched on one of the lot’s picnic benches.
“You guys on strike over there?” he yelled. “Come over here and join the crowd!”
Last spring, Gray and his students captured their third-straight L.A. Beautiful trophy for middle school gardens. L.A. Beautiful is a private organization affiliated with Los Angeles Unified.
Alex Davalos, 12, one of Gray’s advanced class students and a garden club member, remembered the awards ceremony and the pizza-and-salad dinner served at the event as one of his favorite moments.
His least favorite moment? “When I get my shoes all wet with mud when we water,” Davalos said.
Davalos plans to continue with horticulture at Gardena High School.
Many of Gray’s former students often return to Peary to check on the garden--and on Gray. Students say they enjoy his sense of humor. But mainly, they appreciate learning about plants.
Michael Mayfield, 13, said he has learned lessons ranging from how to control weeds to the startlingly rapid growth of bamboo trees.
“Bamboo grows three inches a day,” Mayfield said. “I didn’t believe it when Mr. Gray told us that, but it gets taller and taller every week.”
One of the students’ biggest projects is planting strawberries. Last year, Gray said, 5,000 strawberry plants were cultivated--yielding several hundred quarts of the fruit.
Last week, as the strawberry planting began anew, the students complained about the task after Gray asked them to plant longer rows.
Gray coaxed them along by talking about the future fruits of their labor.
“Just think of all the strawberry shortcakes you can make when we pick these things, “ Gray told a grumbling Donald Martin, 13. “And don’t forget my famous strawberry preserves.”
Replied Martin: “These things are going straight off the vine and in my stomach.”
