Published: July 06, 2006 12:09 pm      

Jefferson garden is something to grow on

There’s something growing between the old and new Jefferson elementary schools.

And it isn’t just children.

It is food and flowers along with the knowledge students are gathering as they tend to a plot of land that will yield living things — and possibly some cold hard cash.

With the help of Home Depot volunteers and funds from the Clinton School District’s 21st Century Program, the 50-by-50-foot plot of land is being turned into seven unique gardens.

There’s a pizza garden, which will be used to grow all the herbs needed to make pizza sauce, two salsa gardens, vegetable and corn gardens, a flower garden for dried flowers and a salad garden. Students involved in the after school program will weed and water and the crops will be harvested so students can make salsa, dry the flowers and set up a farmers’ market. If the market if successful, the students will decide how to spend the profits.

Gardening tends to be a skill shared by one generation with another, and it would be easy to overlook teaching it to our youngsters, especially in an age when it’s so easy to dash into a grocery store.

The beauty of this program is that it teaches students the skills to grow something on their own, the power of nature and the chance to pretty up their own corner of the world.

But it gives so much more than that, including a sense of satisfaction and abilities that they can carry into adulthood.

For all of those reasons, we hope it is something that can be offered every year.