Students from several Colonial School District elementary schools are harvesting the fruits of their labors this week after planting and maintaining vegetable gardens at their schools over the spring.
Fifth grade students from Carrie Downie in New Castle snipped and collected several large bags full of spinach Tuesday that they grew on school grounds as part of a garden-based educational program led by area nonprofit Healthy Food for Healthy Kids. The food will be prepared and served by cafeteria workers alongside planned lunches later in the week.
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HFHK executive director, Thianda Manzara, developed the garden programs for use with the science curriculum in schools around the state. She founded her organization to show students where their food comes from and how to grow a garden, but mostly to get them to think more about what they put into their bodies.
"Getting kids to eat more healthy that is absolutely the main motivation," Manzara said. "What we'd like to see kids do is just learn that vegetables can be delicious. It'll never be bad advice to eat more vegetables as part of a healthy diet."
Colonial Child Nutrition Supervisor, Paula Angelucci, said illustrating the agriculture process is an effective way of encouraging healthy eating habits.
"They're more excited about the tastings when they know that it was from THEIR garden," Angelucci said. "And then they go home and tell their parents and that builds excitement."
Colonial implemented three school gardens - Carrie Downie, New Castle and Eisenberg elementary schools - with financial help from USDA Farm to School grant. Each grade-level has a gardening role to play, from preparing soil and planting to watering, harvesting and composting.
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The crops are mostly cool weather fast-growing vegetables to minimize the impact of frost and snow. This spring, students are harvesting arugula, spinach, lettuce turnips and chard.
Jason Brown, nutrition specialist for Colonial, says preparing and serving freshly harvested vegetables is a challenge for his minimal staff that tends to avoid scratch cooking. His staff must also be creative, as serving foods like steamed spinach and roasted kale to students can be a hard sell.
"One of the most fun things is taking this off the wall produce and finding ways kids will enjoy it," said Brown. "Olive oil, salt and pepper; you can't go wrong with any of that. Some of the produce we can roast like the turnips. Some of the radishes we're able to showcase them raw. We have little vegetable bags with raw broccoli and carrot sticks and we'll maybe give a hummus cup or ranch cup. And you'd be surprised; saying 'Here's a radish' or 'Do you want a Radical radish chip?', you get a lot more takers just by the name of it."
Angelucci says she would like to see a garden at every Colonial K-5 school, but plans to make the gardens bigger are not likely, due to logistics.
"For right now," she said, "we're able to deal with the quantity of produce that we receive and everybody is not stressed about it."
However, since the program began last school year, more and more teachers from the district are looking to join in.
"At first they were like 'I don't know if we want a school garden', she said. "Now everybody wants a school garden. And that's exciting. Change is good."