Moulton Celebrates May Day with Support from Burpee Home Gardens
It was a different sort of May basket they were handing out yesterday at Moulton Extended Learning Center. Instead of popcorn and candy there were bagsful of tomatoes and other produce.
Moulton was selected as a stop on the Burpee Home Gardens “Grow Anywhere Tour” and received 1,300 pounds of produce and 450 vegetable plants to be given out to families in the school community, as well as 50 plants for the school’s own onsite garden.
More than a million votes were cast on Facebook during a contest to target 23 urban communities as tour stops for the bountiful Burpee’s truck. The “Grow Anywhere Tour” is aimed at inspiring new generations of urban gardeners. The program focuses on four E’s: Education, Eating Better, Environment, and Economy.
“This opportunity is tremendous for our students, staff and community,” said Susan Rushing, Moulton kindergarten teacher and coordinator of the garden program. “We will be able to expand our existing garden and teachers will learn more about how to use gardening in the classroom.” That’s where the four E’s really flourish. As one example Rushing noted that the Facebook contest required would be voters to solve problems as a means of preventing automated stuffing of the online ballot box. “So the kids were really motivated to do math so they could vote for their school,” she explained.
Rushing and two of her colleagues at Moulton, Patti Johnson and Heather Werning, each received training from the Food Corps, a vital partner in the school’s renewed emphasis on gardening and healthy diets. They applied for a grant on the school’s behalf and coordinated a resurrection of a plot on the school grounds that had gone to seed until a year ago. Yesterday it was crawling with students filling pots with soil. A John Deere tractor sat nearby, an incongruous prop in a milieu otherwise dominated by asphalt, concrete and brick. The other element that felt out of place was the weather. Rushing wore a parka while the hardy Early Girl tomato starts shook and shivered in the unseasonal north wind. But a community spirit of sow and reap will outlast yesterday’s temporary chill. Plenty of folks turned out and their collective mood overwhelmed mere weather. Moulton Principal Craig Saddler said the enthusiasm of Rushing, Johnson and Werning is infectious and noted the school has help from neighborhood stakeholders like Urban Ministries in keeping the kids and the morale and the vegetables all growing.
Yesterday’s frigid conditions notwithstanding, there are better days in store at Moulton. Lots of them. The atmosphere there is nourishing whatever it happens to be like outdoors. As for the Burpee’s squad, in a classic demonstration of the axiom that no good deed goes unpunished, they were due in Minnesota today along with enough snow to make the weather here feel balmy – almost. Try to think of it as fertilizer instead of, you know, fertilizer.
