Nonprofit lends green thumb to Lodi students’ vegetable garden
Looking for another project to beautify Lodi’s east side, the nonprofit organization Greening Lodi helped Joe Serna Jr. Charter School install three planter boxes for a vegetable garden for their middle-schoolers in March, a project coordinated in part by Carla Dalfonso, a science teacher at Serna.
“It was a nice little project they did, something to help our community and school. It was a good way to teach the kids how to be responsible and help them to learn where food comes from,” Dalfonso said
Tanya Hansford, Greening Lodi’s vice president and a records clerk for the Lodi Police Department, said she reached out to Dalfonso last year and Dalfonso invited Greening Lodi’s board of directors to a student council meeting in which the students said they wanted to plant vegetables.
“We kind of just let them talk. It could have been anything, we could have planted flowers in front of the school, but the students were the ones who suggested planter boxes,” Hansford said.
Greening Lodi had raised approximately $700 earlier in 2017 when they auctioned off a kayak donated by Dan Arbuckle of Headwaters Kayaks, Hansford said, and put the money toward buying plants and materials for the garden.
After waiting for the holiday season to end, the Serna middle-schoolers set up the garden on March 31, Hansford said, with help from so many people that the project was completed that day, instead of two weekends as was originally planned. The only thing left to do, she said, is to bring representatives from the San Joaquin County Master Gardeners to teach the students about the plants sometime in the coming weeks.
“We even had parents and students from the elementary school help, so we had the entire campus cleaned up in two hours. Tanya was very kind, she brought her mother, they brought all the plants and soil and we built all the boxes with our kids,” Dalfonso said.
Fernando Gallo, Greening Lodi’s president who teaches journalism at San Francisco State University, taught the students how to build the boxes, he said, with the help of another father who also lent some power tools.
“It was a simple project: Just some cedar planks, a few screws and that was it. The kids were very hard workers, and very responsible. It feels good not only on a personal level, but something that’s really important to our organization is to keep the Eastside residents as involved as possible. It’s really important for them to take as much pride in our community as possible,” Gallo said.
Once the boxes were built, Dalfonso said, the students planted zucchini, basil, strawberries, parsley, bell pepper and Big Boy hybrid tomatoes. The students’ excitement has only grown with time, she said, as has her own.
“The kids love it. They ask to water the plants, they want to know who gets to eat the strawberries. It also gave them a sense of pride, and hopefully we can build more and do more as time goes on,” Dalfonso said.