Gesu garden teaches kids about life
Joe Kohn of The Michigan Catholic
Published June 2, 2006
Detroit – Students at Gesu School are planting everything from peppers to paw paw trees as a large-scale science project in a corner lot on their campus off McNichols Road in northwest Detroit.
And educators say vegetation isn't the only thing that's growing in the urban garden – so is hands-on education, and a connection to the earth and teamwork that will develop a valuable sense of God's world to the students.
"God gave us a world that works," says Sr. Angela Hibbard, IHM, executive assistant to the principal at Gesu.
"This is putting kids in a learning setting where they're finding the original processes that God designed."
The garden – a project that earned the school a $10,000 grant from Toyota Motor Co. – is part of a larger project called Gesu Community Green, a parish-sponsored playground open to the community.
The urban garden effort is spearheaded by Gesu science teacher Michelle Balsam, who each week this spring has supervised her fourth-, fifth- and sixth-grade classes in planting and cultivating the garden. Volunteers from the parish and school did the heavy-duty job of removing concrete from the lot and replacing it with the garden's foundation.
 Seeds of education
With Gesu's urban garden project, students are experiencing…
• Science – how soil, insects, water and sunlight work together to cultivate vegetation.
• Religion – how God created the earth to support and nurture life.
• Teamwork – how to work together and trust one another in doing the various tasks necessary to make a garden.
• Charity – how their efforts can make a positive impact on Gesu's campus and to the broader community.
| From there, it became an ecological instrument of education.
"This is very hands-on," says Balsam. "Instead of seeing the picture in the book of clay and sand and soil, (students are) seeing it first-hand, from start to finish. They're going to see the fruits of their labor."
With help from the River Raisin Institute, a nonprofit that supports sustainable living practices, the students have planted an all-organic garden, void of herbicides and pesticides. The various vegetables students have planted will be used next school year to make salsa.
"We've planted corn. We've planted marigolds and onions," said Candice Leatherwood, a fourth-grader at the school. "I learned how to plant and dig. And when you dig, don't dig too deep into the sand, or it won't grow."
Her classmate, Kijohn Jackson, can describe just how the class prepared the garden.
"We put topsoil over the sand, plant the seeds, put wood chips down, and put some hay over the plants, then kind of cleaned it up after we were done," Kijohn said.
Some students, like Justin Piotrowski, said it was valuable to take an in-class project – like learning about vegetation – and see it grow in real life.
"I did a project on the small sugar pumpkins, and I was wondering how you would plant them," Justin said. "So I finally got to plant them."
And when the seeds are planted, the students know how to nurture them.
"I learned that plants need full sunlight, and they need carbon dioxide and water," said fourth-grader Tyara Green.
As of late May, the stems and leaves of tiny plants could be seen growing in the garden in horseshoe-shaped rows, a method used to encourage natural pollination. The students also learned how uninteresting or unappealing parts of everyday life can be used in God's creation to grow something special.
For example, the garden was fertilized with compost made partly of lunch leftovers digested by earthworms.
Michael Neumann, the executive director of the River Raisin Institute, says the garden teaches the valuable lesson – especially in the school's urban setting – that for people to progress, they've got to get along with nature.
"You see this in the city. We've separated ourselves more and more from the earth and from each other, really," Neumann said. "It's important for the kids to come out here to do something together, but also to get a chance to work with the land."
Balsam added that the long-term goal of the project is to have a lasting, positive piece of the community that the students can take ownership of.
"I want them to have pride in their environment, pride in their work," Balsam said. "Hopefully it's going to be sustainable so in many years they can come back and say, 'We started this.'"
For now, though, as the students take their various roles in cultivating their garden – by shoveling woodchips, using wheelbarrows, raking or planting – they also appear to be cultivating their sense of community.
"What's the best part?" said fifth-grader Matthew Creer. "Everybody's working as a team."
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