ACGC students harvest food from veggie garden for school lunches
GROVE CITY - The dry soil of a one-acre garden exploded Wednesday afternoon as an army of eager fourth-grade students at ACGC, armed with spades, forks and hand tools, harvested potatoes and carrots from the high school garden.By: Carolyn Lange, Associated Press
- Harvesting lunch
GROVE CITY - The dry soil of a one-acre garden exploded Wednesday afternoon as an army of eager fourth-grade students at ACGC, armed with spades, forks and hand tools, harvested potatoes and carrots from the high school garden.
By the time their 1½-hour shift had ended, the 40 students had dug, weighed and washed 151 pou-nds of potatoes and 126 pounds of carrots.
They loaded crates of the still wet vegetables onto their school bus and delivered them to the elementary school kitchen in Atwater wh-ere cooks will serve up the produce as part of the school lunch program in the Atwater-Cosmos-Grove City district.
In the morning the ACGC fourth-grade students from Cosmos put in their time and harvested 78 pounds of potatoes, 109 pounds of carrots, 29 pounds of cucumbers and three pounds of peppers.
“I’m very pleased with what we’ve been able to pull out of the garden this year,” said Tami Bennet-Tait, an ACGC High School science teacher who has coordinated the massive garden project since it began last year.
This spring she orchestrated the planting of the garden, which was done with student volunteers, who also spent time weeding the long rows this summer.
The school received a grant from the Statewide Health Improvement Program to help fund the project as a way to encourage students to eat a variety of healthful foods.
Since the harvest began this fall, ACGC students have dug 1,112 pounds of potatoes, 629 pounds of carrots, 367 pounds of cucumbers, 15 pounds of peppers and several eggplants.
The items have been showing up on the lunch menu, said Bennet-Tait, who’s hoping the warm season is extended to give the melons in the garden time to ripen.
“The kids get it,” said Pam Bagley, Statewide Health Improvement Program coordinator from Meeker County. When they help plant, weed and harvest vegetables and get to see what vegetables, like eggplant, look like, they’re more likely to eat it when it’s served in the lunch line, she said.
Many of the kids haven’t had personal gardening experience until working in the school garden.
On Wednesday, Bennet-Tait gave students a quick primer on how to use garden forks and to shake the dirt clumps apart to find the potatoes.
She demonstrated how to snap off the carrots’ green tops and how to wash them with a brush. Students were instructed to use bare hands to gently wash potatoes so that the skin wasn’t damaged.
The fast-paced assembly line of activity included weighing buckets of produce and even measuring the length of a few carrots and the circumference of potatoes to incorporate other educational lessons into the exercise.
“It’s fun,” said Mara Lambert, who was busy digging carrots. She’s helped with her grandmother’s garden but doesn’t have one of her own.
Brandon Wegener was a whiz with the spade and quickly dug up a long section of carrots as his classmates pulled them up and put them in buckets. Wegener also managed to pick up and eat quite a few stray carrots fresh from the garden.
Bennet-Tait said school officials will evaluate the data from this year’s harvest and determine if any changes need to be made to the garden for next year.
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