School garden that had gone to seed gets a green thumbs up
Watts old-timers say the bramble of trees next to the police station at Locke High School used to be a garden. Indeed, when students started clearing out the trash and underbrush, they found a stone path built by the Future Farmers of America, dated 1983.
They dug up the soil and mixed in many bags of compost. And Saturday, the garden rose again.
Hundreds of students with trowels and gloves knelt in the dirt to plant 5,000 seedlings: leaf lettuce, cauliflower, onions, artichokes, cilantro.
“I wanted to make the school look better. I wanted to see a whole lot of flowers and pretty stuff,” said first-time gardener Vanessa Gurubel, 18, a senior who was painstakingly setting inch-high pansy seedlings in a long, neat row. She would take home packets of lettuce and carrot seeds to plant a garden of her own in her backyard.
Va’shawn Malone, 17, cupped one hand around a delicate romaine lettuce seedling, digging in the soil with the other.
“Maybe we’ll leave something here, and the next students make it better,” he said.
The rebirth of the Locke High garden started with a $1,500 grant from the charitable arm of the Western Growers Assn., a large agricultural trade group. The Saturday “garden makeover” was sponsored by a private-public partnership called the California School Garden Network, which hopes to bring a garden to every school in the state.
But the real impetus came from the school agriculture teacher, Kuwanda Bonilla, who applied for the grant, and school counselor James Persons, whom many students describe as their ally and friend.
Persons became known as a champion of students at Hollenbeck Middle School in Boyle Heights before moving to Locke.
He organized student volunteers who started work in mid-September on the tangle of pines and olive trees once used as a hideaway where people did drugs and had sex.
Young people cleared branches so the sun could warm the ground. They struggled to remove tree stumps sunk deep in the ground. Girls, who outnumbered boys, boasted of being superior stump removers.
Persons roamed the bare, cultivated plots Friday, moving with a slight shuffle, reminiscent of Charlie Chaplin with his round bowler-style hat pulled down over curly hair. Gardening gloves were stuffed in an apron pocket.
With pride, he pointed out the 4-foot-deep hole that he and his students dug with hand tools. It will become a small fish pond.
Art students will design and paint murals on nearby walls, Person said. They might paint a green vine on the paths around the garden, like a yellow brick road, tying the garden together. Math students will measure crop yield.
This quiet corner is to be a classroom for the entire school.
“This started with a trickle, and now it’s a river,” Persons said.
Saturday opened with a visit from First Lady Maria Shriver, wife of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, honorary chairwoman of the California School Garden Network. In T-shirt and jeans, she knelt to set artichoke seedlings in soil as parents snapped photographs.
A wave of students started work, all in matching yellow T-shirts, assigned to broccoli, tomatoes and herbs.
Two volunteers watched the transformation with particular interest. Betty Garcia, 62, and Efrain Ortiz, 71, of Los Angeles said they first began cleaning up the garden area seven years ago, when it was littered with beer cans, condoms and needles.
“This is magnificent,” Garcia said.
The nearby police station will move to a new site on campus, and its old quarters will be renovated as a garden shed. The garden’s name is Sanctuary.
Student Patricia Quinones estimated that she already has spent more than 60 hours there, which inspired an essay that won a school prize.
“Since we started, nothing but hard work has been put in the garden,” she wrote. “I noticed that participating in this project has united us more, not only as a group but also as the community that we are.... This wonderful garden was absolutely the best thing to do at Locke High School.”
