Handful of fava beans at the entrance to the garden at Sharpstein Elementary.
Hi all, my name is Elissa. I am an Environmental Humanities major, Class of 2023, and I’ve spent the past few months as a Garden Education Intern at the Walla Walla Farm to School Program. Farm to School is a nationwide nonprofit organization that provides opportunities for kids to access and learn about nutritious, local foods. Our local program runs through the Sustainable Living Center, and has gardens at various locations around town that are open to the community and used for educational purposes.
If I were to sum up the entire whirlwind summer into just a few main themes, it would be: engaging kids with the garden, watching them grow through working in and harvesting from it, and learning meaning through art and cooking. This mainly took place at Sharpstein Elementary during their five-week Summer Sol program, with shorter activities during drop-in hours at local parks and the YMCA. We also held open garden hours twice a week, where kids can come with their family to work on some garden tasks and take home fresh produce, but we found a staggering lack of attendance despite outreach efforts.
Gardening brings out another side in kids- in everyone, really. We become more still, we breathe deeper, we notice the little organisms coexisting around us, we dig our knees into the dirt. I found being outside also helped kids to be themselves, to show us their empathy skills, the garden setting giving them opportunities to be gentle or to embody patience. Our “Food Memories” art project showed me sides of kids that couldn’t have been expressed just with words, revealing so much about their pasts, identities, what brings them joy- I could have spent hours with a student and not been able to learn as much about what they value as I did seeing what they captured in their crayon-and-marker drawings. They would also open up talking while they had a pen in their hands. A second-grader would rave about the themed cakes his mom makes for his birthday every year- she always surprises him with one that involves his special interest. Two fifth-graders bounce ideas of ramen ingredients off one another, and a girl describes to me the inviting smell of her kitchen when her family is all gathered to make tamales.
I grew over the summer; I developed leadership in my role through cooking, guiding half the group of students through preparing food, while the other half worked on an art project with the Garden Education Manager, such as making recipe books or using natural pigments from the garden to create paint. During our week with each grade, we would make a vinaigrette to try with vegetables and edible flowers from the garden, we’d pick and process basil and garlic to make pesto, we’d learn proper knife safety in order to make salsa. The kids gained confidence just as quickly as I did while cooking; in no time, I felt much more comfortable delegating tasks while teaching kids measurements and how to chop, and they showcased more of their independence and culinary skills by the day.
Collage: Before, during, and after view of the central bed at the Sharpstein Garden.
An exciting project I got to work with during my time at the Sharpstein garden was the new wheelchair-accessible central bed, which transformed from a patch of borage that we were throwing green matter into, to a functional and irrigated bed that is now sporting legs of malabar spinach and bushing basil next to tomatoes heavy with fruit, complete with educational markers with nutritional information. This was very much a community project, involving the Garden
Education Manager, Program Supervisor, and- of course- the kids. In the third image of the central bed, everything has been freshly planted; students found the proper depth to bury the tomato starts, another group spaced out the malabar spinach, daring each other to smell the fish emulsion fertilizer as they fed the new plants. Our first-graders looked at decomposers in our compost as they learned how to mulch by blanketing the central bed with it. Fifth-graders got to make “watering stations” with rocks in a shallow pool of water and compost for pollinators to drink from, inviting them into the garden to land on their budding tomato flowers. These kids grew this food, their hands shifted the dirt for these roots and their arms lifted the watering can together. If I’d like to see anything in the future, it is the kids of Walla Walla feeling safe and welcome to bring their guardian with them to open garden hours at their school; this garden is made by and for them and their classmates, and they should be eating from it long past their time in the Farm to School educational program.
Experiences like Elissa Corless’s are made possible by the Whitman Internship Grant, which provides funding for students to participate in unpaid internships at nonprofit, some for-profit, and government organizations. We are happy to be sharing blog posts from students who were supported by either summer, fall, spring, or year-long grants at organizations, businesses, and research labs all around the world. To learn how you could secure a Whitman Internship Grant or host a Whitman intern at your organization, contact us at ccec_info@whitman.edu.