Wakefield garden: changing the community one tomato at a time

The+community+garden+behind+Wakefield+Elementary+will+provide+food+in+future+harvests.

Becca Fiely

The community garden behind Wakefield Elementary will provide food in future harvests.

Emily Callahan and Rebecca Fiely, Features Editor and Arts & Entertainment Editor

Beginning in March of 2015, Wakefield High School’s agriculture program and Wakefield Elementary School embarked on developing a communal garden in an unoccupied space on the elementary grounds. Since then, the garden has influenced Wakefield’s community in numerous ways, ranging from educational growing experiences, to ending hunger within the Wakefield area.

Pam Welker, Wakefield Elementary Science Coordinator, and Jodi Riedel, Wakefield High School agriculture and food science teacher, teamed up to visualize the transformation of the property in order to produce the flourishing garden.

“We used to have a fifth grade pod out where the garden is now, and it used to look like someone had dropped a bomb; there was concrete everywhere,” said Welker. “[The Wakefield Elementary staff] started thinking about putting the garden out there, but at about the same time, maybe before the garden was mentioned, I had reached out to Jodi Riedel.”

The communication between Welker and Riedel contributed to the commencement of the garden.

“Jodi was very excited about the idea of a garden,” said Welker. “She’s an amazing lady and was incredibly gracious and she reached back out; we immediately hit it off.”

The garden is a result of the growing partnership between the two; however, the financial portion is due to various grants.  

The North Carolina Beautiful is a nonprofit organization that offers The Windows of Opportunity grant, which is funded by Coastal Federal Credit Union.  Riedel has previously applied for the grant and received it multiple times, including this year.

Riedel applied for the Food For All grant and received it three times, making Wakefield the only school in the country to receive the grant at this quantity.

“[The Food For All grant] is $2,500 dollars and it is a huge initiative from FFA (Future Farmers of America),” said Riedel.

The grant enables the school to not only construct the project, but expand its influence to the rest of the community.

“[Wakefield is] a small school, and the facet that we added is building this new garden,” said Riedel.  “At first it was the garden here at the high school, the second time it was another garden we built in the back, and now it’s at the elementary school.”

Community outreach is just one of the many elements within the garden; its sole purpose is rooted in educating youth on agriculture.

“A big thing that we’re doing with the garden is showing kids where their food comes from because a lot of them don’t know,” said junior Bailey Parrish, Horticulture and FFA member.

Wakefield Elementary School has also contributed to the project immensely, and the after effects are visible within the younger students.

“I love seeing the elementary students out there helping the high-school students and taking ownership,” said Welker.

To integrate the elementary schoolers into the project, a board of Garden Ambassadors, ranging from grades K through 5, has aided the high schoolers in designing and organizing the garden.

“There are grade level gardens in the back and those were envisioned by our grade level ambassadors, what we call our ‘garden advisors board,’” said Welker. “We have kids from kindergarten through fifth grade who met and talked about what we would like to see in the garden. The kids got to cut out pictures and plan their garden as ambassadors for their grade level.  We then took their plans and tried to figure out what areas of study were relevant to what they wanted.”

The Garden Ambassadors played a major role in the planning process for the garden.

“[The Garden Ambassadors] cut pictures out of magazines, then we glued them to a piece of construction paper, and then under it we wrote the plant name,” said Anderson Cole, fourth grade Garden Ambassador. “After that, we figured out where it would go in the garden, and how much space we would have.”  

The Garden Ambassadors are not the only elementary schoolers who have benefitted from the community garden; the children in the Backpack Buddies program have been affected as well.

“The food nutrition program for our low income students at [Wakefield Elementary] is called Backpack Buddies,” said Welker.  “Every Friday they go home with a backpack full of fresh food.  We not only use the garden for demonstration purposes, but we pull from it to eat and teach kids how to prepare food.”

According to the NC Department of Public Instruction, over 780,000 children, in North Carolina alone, are at risk of going hungry and not receiving proper nourishment to live healthy, active lifestyles.

“[The elementary schoolers] learn about the different aspects of food being provided to them and the nutritional value all of those things are incorporated,” said Welker.

Riedel established a Food Science program to connect the science of food with real world scenarios.

“Jodi and I organized the time to have the sessions,” said Welker. “A couple of Mrs. Riedel’s students come down, do a demonstration and talk to the kids about the specific foods they are preparing as well as the ways you can use them and why they’re important.”

The garden continues to reiterate the importance of having access to and knowledge on the importance of fresh, whole foods.

“Every month, I’ve been teaching [the elementary schoolers] about the nutrition of food, and my students help them,” said Riedel. “Then we plant something they can take home, and we fill their backpacks with that.  The idea is that this Fall we could really have some good stuff to send home with them and fill their backpacks with, because their backpacks only get filled with the fats and sugars– all processed foods. Hopefully the kids will be able to take the food home and maybe get their parents to buy a thing of radishes, which are about 98 cents.”

Understanding the significance of nutrition early on is crucial to not only the healthy lives of the coming generations, but the continued stewardship of the Earth’s resources.

“I have brought some kindergartners with me to the garden and several of them had never seen a tomato on a vine before,” said Welker. “They thought the tomato grew in Food Lion in the produce section! They would run over and say ‘Ah can we touch it?’ and I would respond, ‘Absolutely! You can actually even eat it if you would like!’ Sometimes you forget that we live in a technological society; we are detached from the Earth.”

The garden reconnects and educates students on the logistics of taking care of the planet, and producing their own food.

“It is really humbling and satisfying to have the ability to grow your own food,” said Reidel. “It fills a spot in your brain, and in your heart, and in your soul that a multiple choice test cannot.”

In short, the impact of the garden will be featured within the community and the people that surround it.

“We are just coming together and making something that everyone can enjoy,” said Parrish. “It just makes my heart full.”