'Lettuce Grow Food'

Summertime usually calls to mind excitement around farm stands, preparing a vegetable garden, and anticipation over the fall harvests, but one might not typically associate middle schoolers with soil and sowing.

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2017-07-18 / Front Page Print article Print Lettuce Grow Food Program teaches students about food while aiding community By KELSEY CHRISTENSEN kchristensen@eagletimes.com (From left to right) Elijah Cass, Brandon Shaw, Rebecca Polk, Madison Haymon, and Olivia Ennen stand in a group as Polk doles out the directions of a garden scavenger hunt at the Lettuce Grow Food summer program, part of the All-4-One Summer Daze camp programming in Springfield. — KELSEY CHRISTENSEN(From left to right) Elijah Cass, Brandon Shaw, Rebecca Polk, Madison Haymon, and Olivia Ennen stand in a group as Polk doles out the directions of a garden scavenger hunt at the Lettuce Grow Food summer program, part of the All-4-One Summer Daze camp programming in Springfield. — KELSEY CHRISTENSENSPRINGFIELD, Vt. — Summertime usually calls to mind excitement around farm stands, preparing a vegetable garden, and anticipation over the fall harvests, but one might not typically associate middle schoolers with soil and sowing. At the Lettuce Grow Food program, a part of All-4-One Summer Daze, however, pre-teens are performing just those tasks. Rebecca Polk, a 7th and 8th grade social studies teacher at Riverside Middle School, developed the camp after identifying two significant social needs: students not feeling like part of the community and Springfield residents being underfed. “I really decided to do this camp after living in Vermont for a while and realizing how many people are malnourished, and there’s so much potential to feed everyone,” Polk said. This is the camp’s inaugural session, and it will teach students an array of skills related to their relationship with food. Polk isn’t an expert gardener — she describes her experience tending a garden as relegated to helping a friend with an urban garden in Washington D.C. — but under her charge, students and high school-aged supervisors will learn about tending and harvesting for two weeks from 2 to 5 p.m. In addition to planting more crops — the students buried potatoes on Monday — the students will also learn about how advertising in the junk food industry affects their tastes in food. They’ll learn about canning, meet with restaurant owners and farmers to discuss menu sourcing and agriculture in macro, decide to whom the food they harvest will go, and learn how to prepare some of the vegetables they reap. “Even on a small budget there are ways we can be changing food habits and support ourselves and support local businesses,” Polk said. The group meets at RMS each day, and traverses a walking path behind the school up to the St. Mark’s Episcopal Church to tend a garden there, although the program is non-denominational and not associated with the church per se. “They’ve [the church] been instrumental in making sure the food gets to people who need it,” Polk said. On the first day, Monday, students began to familiarize themselves with the garden as it is currently with a scavenger hunt project. Polk had the students guess what plants are there — squash, hot peppers, eggplants, tomatoes and broccoli, just to name a few — speculate which are ready to harvest, and meet for a discussion over watermelon about what they found. The camp is fairly informal. “Part of learning about gardening is just exploring,” she tells them. But Polk did offer one important directive for the first day: students are discouraged from saying they hate a crop. After some exclamations about hating kale, Polk explains that you might hate a vegetable prepared one way, but not another, and that there may be hundreds of ways to prepare a given dish. Previously, Polk coordinated a different gardening group, informally dubbed the punning Lettuce Grow Food, from which some of the current campers are alumni. During that program, students transplanted lettuce plants from the church gardens before tilling some soil to embed them in their current home. “I liked how we got a kickstart and didn’t have to start from seeds,” said Elijah Cass, who has worked with Polk now as a Lettuce Grow Food participant, social studies student, and now, camper. During the academic year, Polk helps coordinate the after-school garden program at RMS. Haley Gibbons, a rising-senior who acts as a camp counselor in the food camp, says she learned a bit about gardening by helping at the RMS garden while waiting for the Track and Field bus. Polk hopes that after completing the summer program, students will stay involved with the RMS garden. “This is the first step in trying to build a project where students realize that, yes, there are problems in their community, but also that they can come up with ideas on how to solve some of these problems,” Polk said. “People coming together in the community are the agents of change.” For more information about Lettuce Grow Food and other Springfield food programs, contact Polk at rpolk@ssdvt.org.