Indian Brook Elementary students in Plymouth dig into learning, plant vegetable gardens
PLYMOUTH – Students throughout Plymouth are digging into learning this spring. And while the rewards will last a lifetime, some of the tasty benefits will be reaped in just a few months.
With the help of the district’s partners at Terra Cura Inc., children are learning how to plant their own vegetable gardens in raised beds on the school grounds.
Some of the harvest will eventually go to a spaghetti lunch that the the district’s chefs will cook up next fall using tomatoes and fresh herbs. Students and families who volunteer to tend the gardens over the summer will get to take some of the fresh produce home as well, but Terra Cura Director Jackie Millar said anyone is welcome to the food. It is free and meant for the public.
Millar and her nonprofit have been working in schools and elsewhere in the community since 2015 to show how healthy food for everyone is possible.
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It is a community effort. Volunteers from throughout town, including a work crew from the county jail, helped build the raised bed gardens. Earlier this spring, Terra Cura teamed with volunteers from Healthy Plymouth to plant nearly 1,000 seedlings in greenhouses at the Plymouth County Sheriff’s Department’s horticultural farm.
Those seedlings are now telling stories and teaching lessons.
Melissa Ferretti and Madison Hunt, of the Herring Pond Wampanoag Tribe, visited Indian Brook Elementary School last Wednesday to share the Native American legend of the three sisters and help third graders plant corn, beans and squash.
Ferretti, who is chairwoman of the tribe, attended the school when it opened. She told students the legend of how three quarreling sisters were sent to the garden to settle their differences and, in a sign of unity, ended up supporting one another after becoming embedded together in the soil.
The corn stalks provide trellises for the beans to climb. The beans nourish the soil. The squash plants, meanwhile, grow big leaves that shade the ground, keeping the soil moist and weed free.
Third graders in Ann Nadler and Melissa Hogan’s classes planted four hills of three sisters in two beds.
Nadler said the project helped bring learning alive for her students, who have been studying about Wampanoag people as part of their third grade social studies course.
“So they read about this in books, about the Wampanoag people, but to have the chairwoman of the tribe here to carry on this tradition is huge,” Nadler said.
Millar and other volunteers will be working with students to plant similar gardens at other schools and in parks throughout town this month. Students will tend the school gardens through the end of classes. Families then are encouraged to sign up to help water, weed and harvest the gardens over the summer.
Millar said an important lesson of the program is learning to enjoy the fruits of the labor, and she encourages anyone to enjoy the fresh produce that will be maturing in the gardens in the months to come.
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This article originally appeared on wickedlocal.com: Indian Brook third graders in Plymouth plant a vegetable garden
