Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Team kick starts new garden, greenhouse
Group takes horticulture to community
Eight AmeriCorps members shoved a green tarp holding hundreds of pounds of rabbit manure off a trailer and onto the hard, grassy earth near Cloverdale Magnet Middle School on Wednesday afternoon.
Later, one member, Arun Inbavazhvu , 23, of Atlanta kicked the ground several yards from the manure tarp.
“Almost like you’re at the beach,” he said, as his foot grazed a sandy part of the plot his group would soon dig up.
By Thursday morning, that would change.
The 10- member team, dubbed “Earth 5,” tilled up one-third of the sandy 10,000- square-foot plot throughout Thursday and Friday in preparation for a school garden, benefiting the middle school students at Cloverdale.
Their efforts are part of the federally funded Delta Garden Study, a $2 million Arkansas Children’s Hospital Research Institute 2009 initiative geared at fighting childhood obesity. Garden sites include a handful of central and eastern Arkansas middle and high schools such as Cloverdale, Mabelvale Magnet Middle School, Harrisburg Middle School and Marshall High School.
“With projects like this, we really get to transform a community with horticulture,” said Ryan Norman, a
garden program specialist leading the Cloverdale project.
In the study, the garden will become part of the science curriculum at Cloverdale with students — led by their science teachers — working in the garden, learning about it in the classroom and tasting their yields in the lunch hall, said Emily English, the program administrator.
The goal for the students: “Create a stronger relationship with where their food comes from,” English said.
In the next few weeks, Earth 5 will continue tilling the garden site before adding compost and animal manure to the ground, Norman said.
After the group has broken up all the ground, it will plant late summer crops of tomatoes, peppers, watermelons and basil, he said.
Meanwhile, part of the group will begin to erect a 30-foot by 48-foot greenhouse for Cloverdale, he said.
Norman said the garden and greenhouse combination should help provide food year-round for Cloverdale students. They’ll eat it for lunch, taste-test it in their classrooms and maybe even bring some home for dinner, he said.
Team leader Beccah Lanni, 23, of Gurnee, Ill., said the garden will allow the children to “see what [vegetables] look like in the ground and see it on [their] plate.”
Lanni and several other group members said giving the more than 600 Cloverdale students that opportunity is worth the sweat and hard labor.
By late afternoon Friday, his crew wasn’t as worn out as some would assume despite long hours in the sun, Norman said. His AmeriCorps team is full of self-starters, all behind the cause, he said.
And taking a Popsicle break didn’t hurt either, he said.