The produce delivered to the HCS Family Services food pantry in Hinsdale this week could not be any fresher. It was harvested only hours earlier and blocks away at Monroe School.
Back to school only two days, first-graders took turns pulling up carrots, digging up potatoes and beets, and peeling away the outer leaves on large cabbages in the school garden Thursday.
Danette Riehle, a retired Monroe School teacher, stays involved in the garden she helped found about 22 years ago with Sue Ekblad. This garden and other gardens outside Monroe have become a joint project of the teachers, students, Parent-Teacher Organization and other volunteers.
As the children filed into the garden, which is enclosed with a white picket fence and chicken wire, Riehle asked them if they remembered what they had planted last spring when they were kindergartners.
“Broccoli,” said one. “Beans,” said another.
The beans did not do too well, Riehle said. “We are going to plant them again”
Some, like the cabbage, had gone is as plants. But the children had grown beets, lettuce, radishes, onion and kale from seeds. In their classrooms last spring, they had placed the seeds at equal distances on a strip of toilet paper. They held the seeds in place with a drop of paste made of flour and water. The paper was folded, then carried out to the garden and planted.
Potatoes, carrots and cabbages all had grown well, Riehle said.
“Those are big cabbages,” she said.
Surprisingly, they were quite a few strawberries growing on plants low to the ground, although strawberries usually ripen earlier in the summer.
“We didn’t get a lot of strawberries in June,” Riehle said. “We thought maybe the plants were getting old.” But come August, there is fruit on the strawberry plants.
“You’re always learning,” said Riehle, who lives in Clarendon Hills.
The students learn about the food chain in the early grades at Monroe, Riehle said.
“In the first grade, they learn about the producers. The plants are the producers. In the second grade, they learn about the consumers,” she said.
Animals and people are the consumers, Riehle explained. The third-graders learn about the decomposers, “and that completes the food chain,” she said.
“We tell the kids the decomposers are the FBI, fungus, bacteria and invertebrates,” Riehle said.
The garden has a sprinkling system to keep it watered during the summer. A neighbor weeds the raised beds.
Fourth- and fifth-graders study the growth of and the life in a separate prairie garden and a pond at Monroe.
PTO members Sara Herman, Kristen Ritter and Geegee Kan serve as this year’s co-coordinators of the vegetable garden, prairie garden and pond, which together form a living classroom at Monroe, a joint effort of the teachers, children, the PTO and other volunteers.
The mothers and retired teacher Maureen Miks wiped the dirt off the vegetables and rinsed them before they were delivered to the food pantry for distribution.
While the produce was removed from the garden, containers of butter crunch and romaine lettuce and mesclun waited to be planted.
Along with more broccoli and beans, they will be the fall crops at Monroe.
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