Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2008
by Melissa J. Brachfeld | Staff Writer
Six-year-old Wilber Vasquez's smile was as bright as the giant yellow sunflower he cradled in his small hands.
"I grew this," the first-grader announced with pride. "It's bigger than all the others."
Vasquez's towering sunflower is just one of the many that he and 14 other students have grown, along with a variety of other flowers, vegetables and fruits, in a garden at Sargent Shriver Elementary School.
On Friday, the Children's Garden Club at the Aspen Hill school will enter produce from their plentiful bounty into the 60th annual Montgomery County Agricultural Fair at the county's Agricultural Center in Gaithersburg.
Pharr Adams, a substitute teacher at Sargent Shriver, said she started the club during the 2006-07 school year, but this is its first year competing in the fair.
"It was created as part of an after-school program that hopes to give the students a complete gardening experience - from planting the seeds through reaping the glorious bounty," she said. "Many city-raised children do not understand or appreciate how food is grown. "Additionally, it is becoming commonplace that children are inactive and out of touch with nature."
Adams said the program was established in partnership with Linkages to Learning, which offers services to at-risk children and their families to improve performance in school, as well as the school's PTA and Montgomery County 4-H.
She said 4-H will offer the children free admission to the fair, which begins Friday and ends Aug. 16.
The club starts meeting each school year in March, Adams said, to discuss how members will plant the garden. She also offers crafts to the children and arranges for a representative from Montgomery County 4-H to teach about nutrition.
The youngsters begin prepping the garden in April and planting in May.
Each child is given a small plot in the garden, which is located in one of the school's three courtyards, and is allowed to pick plants to grow.
And, after months of tending to their gardens, some of the club's members got to taste the fruits of their labors last week.
Armed with baskets and bags, the children ran through the garden July 30, plucking bright-red cherry tomatoes and cucumbers from the vines and pulling small carrots from the ground. The garden also contains zinnias, hyacinth beans, pumpkins and corn.
Crunching on a carrot, Gency Campos, who will be a sixth-grader at Parkland Middle School in Aspen Hill in the fall, said the club has taught him a lot about nature.
"You get to learn how to take care of plants, like putting them in soil and stuff, and how seeds get from one place to another," the 12-year-old Wheaton resident said.
Maricruz Villeda, Wilber's mother and Sargent Shriver PTA president, said the garden is a source of pride for students and the school community.
"It's grown up and turned out so beautifully," she said. "And it helps the kids so much because they get to learn more about how nature takes its course in seeing the flowers, vegetables and fruits develop so nicely. They've grown it themselves and it just makes them so proud."
A few feet away, Adams watched as one of the students pulled a carrot from the ground. Beaming, he held it out for her to inspect.
"You look at the kids pull up a carrot and you'd think they had found a million dollars from the way they smile," she said.
