A Child’s Garden at Cleveland High

The triangular plot of land looked more like a dirt pile than a garden when they began.

But the 3-, 4- and 5-year-olds at Cleveland High’s on-campus preschool will soon see the fruits--and vegetables--of their labors.

Tuesday morning--with a little help from high school students and two volunteers from Home Depot and Color Spot (a Home Depot vendor)--the 50 or so youngsters played in the dirt and planted a vegetable garden with cucumbers, zucchinis, tomatoes, Japanese eggplants, bell peppers, strawberries and cantaloupes.

The project is part of Cleveland’s Careers With Children program--which trains high-school students for careers in early-childhood education by running an on-campus preschool, said program coordinator Stephanie Branman, a Cleveland teacher.

Home Depot and Color Spot provided the plants, bone meal and pint-sized hoes, rakes and shovels--still considerably taller than the enthusiastic students who used them.

Wielding his yellow-tipped rake in a manner befitting a samurai, Stephen Casey worked the earth like a pro.

The stoic 4-year-old seemed to prefer toiling in silence, only occasionally yelping, “I heard a ding!” when his tool struck a rock.

Asking her son to keep his rake closer to the ground, mom Peggy Casey was pleased with the garden experiment.

“It’s good for them to be outside,” she said. “It’s better than playing Nintendo in front of the TV.”

The more verbose Ryan Collins, 5, explained his task. “I planted peppers. I hoed. I raked. I shoveled.”

And the garden? “I think it’s nice. It’s fun.”

Now planted, the garden will become a regular part of the preschool curriculum, Branman said.

“On Thursdays, we’ll have the kids take care of it. They’ll use little watering cans and they can pull weeds. They’ll learn to work with nature and the value of seeing something grow from start to finish.”

And come summer, the tots will make one doozy of a salad.