Our hometown – Billings, Oklahoma – is a rural village, really, though that is not an Okie word. “Town” is the word we use normally – but it is a very small town.
In January, 22 children from the school – the third- through sixth-graders – came to Turtle Rock Farm to begin to learn how to grow their own vegetables. Together, we built and installed at their school three raised beds, an irrigation system, hoop houses to extend the growing season and planted lettuce, spinach, radishes, carrots, peas, beans. They have had three salads from the lettuce, spinach and radishes.
This week we made our last trip to the school this year for an end-of-school salad party. This time we took a wide variety of vegetables and made a gargantuan salad. As we chopped the vegetables, we smelled them and talked about them, so everyone knew what was in that salad. They knew which vegetables they wanted to eat and which they wanted to avoid. Some liked the smell of lemon balm, but not peppers. All looked forward to the strawberries we’d brought from our own strawberry patch.
One of the party games was a taste-test. A volunteer would close their eyes and open their mouths and we would put a small piece of a vegetable in their mouth and they were to guess what it was. Everyone volunteered. They got a lot of them right. Unrecognizable was the zucchini and the asparagus – both new experiences. The one who got the mushroom recognized it and spit it out; likewise the one who got the snap pea. The amazing thing to me was that they all volunteered for this game – knowing they could get something in their mouth they didn’t like! And, the lad who got a piece of asparagus asked for more!
When we asked them what they’d learned from their gardening experience, they made very good observations, which we pass along to you:
- There are fewer weeds in raised beds than in other gardening spaces.
- Putting the hoop houses on protected the plants from the one freeze we had later in the spring.
- There are lots of different kinds of vegetables.
- Gardening is hard work sometimes.
- Gardening is fun.
Really, that’s what they said.
It’s a small town. It’s a few children. It’s a huge success: it starts with a village.
