Gardening kids harvest vegetables, bake pizzas

Kids in the Hudson School Garden Club do more than plant seeds and harvest crops. They also learn how seeds work and train plants to grow in unusual topiary shapes.

And, if they're lucky, in late summer, they'll bake their own pizzas with veggie toppings from their garden.

Nathan Weiskopf

Eight-year-old Nathan Weiskopf of Rock Hill said harvesting and eating are his favorite gardening activities. His least favorite part: bugs. He doesn't like them even though he knows they can be helpful to gardens by eating plant pests.

His 11-year-old sister, Laine, said she likes to plant the garden but doesn't like to weed it. "You have to bend down to weed and you get really hot," the 6th grader said.

Laine Weiskopf

During the summer, kids in the Hudson club meet twice a week with adult leaders to take care of their garden. The garden plot is behind the elementary school in Rock Hill. This year's garden club season started May 16, a couple weeks before the school year ended.

The kids started planting their garden the last week of May. And, by the middle of June, they already were harvesting radishes. The club's season ended at the end of July.

One of their last activities will be to demonstrate their gardening skills at the St. Charles County Fair in late July.

The kids will show their bug collection and their topiary plants. Also, they'll display their hand-decorated "snake" and "birdhouse" gourds.

Tom Havrilka and Lucy Gish are Hudson school teachers and also garden club leaders.

Ms. Gish, an art teacher, said the kids grew the gourds last year and then let them dry for a year. She'll spray paint the gourds and the kids will add their original designs for the fair showing.

An overall look at the garden

In addition to garden care, the kids learn about growing things. For instance, in mid-June, they took a hike in nearby woods to collect various types of seeds. They've also been on bug-collecting hikes.

Another activity involved using magnifying glasses to check bees that were collecting nectar in the flowers along the garden borders. With magnification, the kids could see how the pollen collects on the bodies of the bees.

When the bees go flower-to-flower, the pollen brushes off and fertilizes the flowers to make seeds for next season.

Mr. Havrilka told the kids not to be afraid of bees. He said bees wouldn't bother them if they didn't bother the bees. "You don't smell sweet like the flowers," he said.

One field trip involves going to a nearby Dierbergs market to look over the displays of fruits and vegetables.

And, at the end of the season, the kids are looking forward to a trip to a nearby Ci Ci's Pizza parlor. There, the store operators let the kids make their own pizzas, using their own harvested vegetables as toppings.

The Hudson garden has a wide variety of raised vegetable beds. Then, around the inside of the fenced garden area, they have planted lots of annual and perennial flowers. Wide, woodchip-lined paths go between the vegetable beds.

That design not only allows for plenty of growing space but also makes the garden colorful.

The Hudson garden has a wide variety of fruits and vegetables.

The radishes were the first vegetable to be ready for harvest. Most of the others would mature later in the season.

The strawberry bed has been in the garden for several years. Ms. Gish said she's come out during a class break to pick a few berries and snack on them.

The kids learn how to be thorough with their weeding in the garden. After pulling the weeds, they put them in trash containers for disposal away from the garden. That way, the weed seeds don't fall off and start new weeds growing.

The kids also look for weeds among the wood chips on the paths.

(The activities of the Hudson School Garden Club will be featured at a National Children and Youth Garden Symposium at the Missouri Botanical Garden July 27-29. The adult teachers and parents from the Hudson Club will explain their year-round program at one of the workshop sessions.)

(Adults from several other St. Louis gardening programs also will present workshop sessions. Among the programs are the Spoede Elementary Outdoor Learning Center, the "rooftop garden" at St. Louis Children's Hospital, a tour of school gardens by Gateway Greening and the St. Louis Parks' Children's Garden Club.)