City Kids becoming Farmers in Somerville

SNN Video: City Kids Becoming Farmers 

Somerville, MA, July 1, 2014 – Students at the East Somerville Community School (ESCS) are learning about plants, the environment, and contributing to the city’s mobile farmer’s market, all in two languages.

The innovative program, organized in partnership with Groundwork Somerville, is wowing students and teachers alike. While the two bilingual third grades have had a module on plants – “plantas” in Spanish – for several years, this year they transplanted half of their seedlings to gardens in the school courtyard. That produce will go to the farmers market. Students took home the other seedlings.

Third grade teacher Nancy Uribe was thrilled to see her students digging in the dirt.

“They know now that this is going to be helping the community,” Uribe told Somerville Neighborhood News. “That’s the most important, because we are a part of the community. If we start now, teaching the children, planting the seed, that even in third grade you can help the community, that will stick with them for the rest of their lives.”

As about 50 excited and sometimes raucous children worked to transplant their seedlings, Groundwork Somerville Lead Garden Educator Sadie Richards moved from student to student, giving advice on the distance between plants or on how deep to dig their holes.

“Today was the culmination of the third grade classes’ project where they started seedlings from seed and got to watch them grow in their classroom, and today was the day where they got to bring out the seedlings to transplant into the garden,” Richards explained.

Third grader Stephanie, who sometimes gardens at home, helped her classmates.

“You want to plant the seed in the ground, you maybe want to give it some water and just leave it there because it wants some space and air and some sunlight,” she said.

Groundwork Somerville and the ESCS program are part of a growing urban agriculture movement in the city. On June 9, the organization celebrated the extension of their South Street Farm with a ribbon cutting attended by friends and officials.

State Agriculture Commissioner Greg Watson said he was impressed by Somerville.

“Somerville is the first city to come up with an urban agriculture ordinance, the first city to come up with a program for urban agricultural ambassadors,” he said. “This is a real example of real leadership on the part of Somerville. In terms of land area, it’s one of the smallest, one of the most densely populated communities or cities in the United States; but to show that they can take small parcels of land, and really try to do what they can to farm them intensively and sustainably, gives hope for a lot of people. So I think this a great, great example.”

Groundwork Somerville has partnered with the ESCS since 2003 and also works with all of the city’s public schools as well as the charter school, Prospect Hill Academy.