Another School Garden!

There is something slightly anarchist about using boxes which used to contain Monster energy drink and junk food from the local junk mart to begin creating a lasagna garden bed. That's exactly what we did yesterday. I had liberated several bags of leaves from the Hood River Library so we used those and the cardboard to begin sheet composting the Klickitat School Garden.
blasagna garden
Some of the kids focused on tearing down on old fence. I grimaced as I watched the boys swinging a sledge hammer but nobody got hurt. The alpha female ran around giving directions to her classmates but generally didn't listen to me. Another girl raked leaves and cleaned up the area around our first garden plot. I tried to direct the kids to help me with the sheet composting or lasagna gardening but it became clear they had no idea what I was talking about so I just started laying down cardboard and dumping the bags of leaves on top. Some would call this modeling. It worked. Once they saw what I was talking about they started helping.

When I began explaining what I was doing, I realized that I was starting at ground zero with several of these kids. This became even more apparent when I started talking about adding manure to our lasagna gardening. One young man was incredulous. "You mean we're putting poop in our garden?" He had a series of questions after that. He was very concerned that I not touch the manure with my hands. As the process unfolded I began to see that we were creating much more than a garden here.

Knowledge which I just take for granted, knowledge which I consider second nature was absolutely startling to these kids. They did not know the connection between the deposits from the south end of a mule going north and spinach. Any why would they? Most of what they called food came from the double-deep-fried-brown-everything section of the adjacent store. Much of their "food" came in a box and got reheated in the oven.

But they learned quickly and grasped on to what I was doing. As I reflected on the process yesterday I realized I had made some assumptions. Although these kids lived in a beautiful rural area, they were actually urban. The term "rurban" came to mind. Rural kids with urban disconnectedness to the great wheel of life.

Some of these kids hunted so they did have the life experience of looking their food in the eye but vegetables and gardens were another matter. A lot happened yesterday. The kids were excited. They learned something and they began creating something which is theirs.