Document text
Helping kids bloom Mail Tribune / Roy Musitelli Kira Steadmon and Chris Griffith, students attending a transition class with the Jackson Education Service District, water plants for an "enabling garden." Through gardening and working with each other cooperatively, students learn important life skills. Garden lets disabled and troubled students learn skills and assist others By JOHN DARLING for the Mail Tribune TALENT - If you need nurture, it helps to nurture plants; that leads you into nurturing people. Such is the theory behind horticulture therapy, now being used in an innovative "enabling garden" that combines severely disabled and shelter home kids with an eye to growing basic life skills: organization, patience, accomplishment and cooperation. Launched a month ago by Mary Foster, a teacher at Harambe School for shelter children, the program brings troubled kids aged 10 to 17 together with 18- to 21-year-old developmentally disabled people to learn gardening - and to sneak in some academics. Both are agencies of Jackson Education Service District and are situated on the old county "poor farm," formerly "a bare, weedy place with one resident gopher." (The poor farm, part of a federal program, housed elderly poor, who devoted their efforts to agriculture.) The youths dig irrigation trenches, build raised beds, make compost and delve into the mysteries of laying out a garden and spacing seeds, a math challenge that might be beyond them in class, said Foster. "In gardening, they're getting everything," she said. "They're being useful, instead of just being on the receiving end of services. Their self-esteem just blossoms when they're doing something for someone else." Under the name "the Gardening Angels," the kids went to Phoenix Elementary's fifth grade with tools and soil amendments to teach students how to plant a "salsa garden" - that's one with garlic and onions. The youths "got to be the experts and to do something useful for others." This week, they'll go to Helman Elementary in Ashland to teach the planting of a vegetable garden, part of a nationwide movement for gardens in the schools. The young horticulturalists also will help with the Listo Project, helping preserve Latino knowledge of healing plants, while developing language skills. The kids say it's working. "I'm pretty much a punk outside. But here, I'm learning to get along with people that I've not gotten along with before," said Nick, 12. "I like it better than public school. Mary makes learning fun." "We help plant trees and also go out on field trips, like to the college pool, the library and the nursing home, where we play games and talk with people," said Zack, 15. "It's helping me with my coping skills." Most shelter kids have not done well in the classroom setting, so academics are brought in to support garden goals, such as plotting how many rows you get using one packet of 50 seeds. Computer science is learned doing virtual garden design. History is being sneaked in as shelter kids research and cultivate the elemental, nonhybrid vegetables and flowers grown at the poor farm during the first half of the 20th century. While the agencies are tax-supported, the gardening project is being done entirely with contributions and foundation grants, including those from the Carpenter Foundation, the local Master Gardeners, Wal-Mart, the Weddle Foundation (an environmental foundation in Salem), the Constitutional Rights Foundation, Lowe's Home Center and Bear Creek Orchards. The program also will support itself with plant sales, fund-raisers and gardening contracts. The agencies have raised half the money for a permanent $12,000 greenhouse, which will be used to train severely disabled young adults in social and vocational skills to support themselves with jobs in commercial nurseries, said Judy Richards, special educator and director of ESD's Steps transition program. "They (shelter kids) are learning to get along with people who are not like them," Richards said. "It makes them feel good to do something for the handicapped people." The program welcomes donations and is especially in need of a truck that can haul soil and tools, as well as transporting students to teaching sites around the Rogue Valley. The use of gardens in the school setting is an old custom that teaches cause-and-effect relationships, care of public space, the dignity of labor, the beauty of nature and the importance of economy, honesty and concentration, said Foster. "Because of the times in which we live, this project is more important than ever," she said. "When one watches the news, the future can seem quite bleak. But gardens signify hope. They require faith that the sun will shine, the rain will fall and things will continue to grow and live." John Darling is a free-lance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at [email protected] Mail Tribune Home | Ottaway Newspapers, Inc. | Dow Jones & Co., Inc. | Privacy | Contact Us Copyright � 2001 Mail Tribune, Inc.