A Perfect Day for Gardening at Hubbell Elementary School
It was a great day for gardening at Hubbell Elementary School.
Iowa’s corn crop is behind schedule getting into the ground but the Hubbell Hawks got their planting done right on schedule today in the school’s garden. It was all hands on deck for a full day of hands-on learning and the weather cooperated by withholding rains until later in the week after the seeds are safely tucked in their beds.
There are about a dozen planters between the building and the playground and they’ll yield a variety of about 30 vegetables and herbs later this summer. The produce will mostly be divvied up amongst the Hubbell families that comprise the school’s PTA Garden Committee. Committee Chairperson Jacob Lederman presided like a ringmaster at today’s planting. Besides the PTA, other community sponsors of the garden are Ernst & Young, Zanzibar’s Coffee, La Mie Bakery, Lederman Bonding Co. and Byron’s Best Massage.
“The garden started four years ago,” Lederman recounted. “It gets better every season. Our committee meets year round to decide on our crops and get starter plants going and then we tend the garden after school gets out, too.”
The school also maintains a compost pile as part of the garden project that incorporates usable waste from the lunchroom.
Different stations were set-up to keep the operation running smoothly on Tuesday. While some kids were planting others were gathering compost or making wildflower seed balls out of clay and dirt. FoodCorps troops Alayna Schutte and Chelsea Krist were working the seed ball table and demonstrating how to concoct something the kids will take home along with written instructions to make sure their seed balls get tossed someplace in the community that could use a spray of wildflowers.
Mary Ann Bower is a Hubbell grandmother with seedlings in kindergarten and 2nd grade. She looked the part of Mother Nature all decked out in gardening gear as she choo-chooed a squad of kindergartners over to her bed where they planted hot peppers and garlic. Check back in July to see if the peppers that sprout have as much pep as the ones who buried them in May. Same goes for the bed where the popcorn was going in.
Pretty soon the magic formula of rain and soil and sunshine and time will have these black boxes overflowing with the stuff of homegrown summer meals. On hot, quiet nights in August you’ll think that you can hear the tomatoes ripening. But not today. The din of chanting and planting; that was unmistakably the sound of kids on the grow.
