Summer Campbell-Kern Valley Sun

Spring...‘tis the time for gardening, and Sabina Mixon's class at South Fork Elementary School has once again started to work on their kinder-garden.

Every year Mixon's kindergarten class plants and harvests a garden. The garden starts in the fall and the class reaps the harvest the following school year. The little gardeners, with help from Mixon, learn how to grow, transplant, and maintain all types of plants. In fact, the students even learn how to extract the seeds from a grown pumpkin and reuse them to produce the next year's pumpkin crop. The kinder-gardeners work with and study several different types of fruit and veggies including pumpkins, cantaloupe, watermelon, bell peppers, tomatoes, carrots, peas, corn, and several varieties of squash.

Students in Mrs. Mixon’s kindergarten class plant onions in their garden.

According to the students the theme of the garden is “Those who work in the garden eat in the garden,” and Mixon said the kids are strict at enforcing this principle. During the summer months the children take turns caring for the garden. The students and parents who volunteer to weed and water the garden during the summer are the ones that are allowed to pick and eat from the garden.

The crops yielded from the garden are used for gifts, holiday cooking, and food for classroom parties. The children carve the pumpkins grown from the previous years students for Halloween, and use them to make pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving. An 80-pound jumbo pumpkin was donated to the garden last year, and the gardeners used the seeds to produce several jumbo pumpkins for this year's students. Two years ago the garden provided such an abundant crop that every kindergartener, every 1st grader and every classroom received a pumpkin, and they still had enough pumpkins left over to make pumpkin pies.

Since the kinder-gardeners that plant this year's crops will only be able to see a small portion of the gardens produce, they are invited to a stir fry party with the kindergartners the next school year. Mixon said that the kids are so excited to see how the garden has grown over the summer that each year she often finds crowds of students lined up at her front door on the first day of school.

The idea for using gardening as a method for classroom learning spawned from retired educators Joyce Mullen and Susan Farmer. When Mullen and Farmer oversaw the garden it was nothing short of a farm, but over the years the garden has been downsized. Cathy Wigan, a teacher at South Fork, had kept a small garden before Mixon took her place. Since Mixon has been teaching, the garden has grown significantly, though it has yet to reach farm proportions.

Mixon's mission to make learning fun has spread to the middle school. Maryann Morgan, a teacher at South Fork Middle School, is also starting a gardening program. The middle school's garden will measure some 6,000-square-feet, and 6th, 7th and 8th grade students will have the opportunity to take gardening as an elective.

The garden is not just used as a fun activity, although Mixon said the gardening unit is “the best time of the year” for her. The garden is used as a hands on way of teaching the California State Standards for Science. The standards require that kindergartners be able to “identify major structures of common plants,” as well as know “how to observe and describe similarities and differences in the appearance and behavior of plants.” Mixon and the students start the garden in the classroom by planting the seeds in small soil rounds and then they transplant them into the garden. The students are taught, through lessons accompanied with observations, how the plants' life cycle works. The students are also taught how to observe the differences in their plant's growth compared to other student's plants. The students graph the progress of the garden for math, write journal entries about their plants, and read books on farming and gardening for reading. A portion of the crops also go to other classrooms to use in their science experiments.

For now the garden is funded by Mixon and donations from Sierra Gateway Market in Southlake, but she is in the process of applying for grants that will help the students to upgrade to different styles of gardening. Mixon has applied and been denied for the “One Classroom At a Time” grant, sponsored by KBAK-TV and other businesses in Bakersfield. She said, “I will keep applying until they get sick of hearing from me and give us the grant.” Mixon is also applying for another grant she plans to use to implement hydroponic gardening.

Currently the students are learning traditional gardening, but Mixon wants to start a hydroponic garden that will allow for a year round garden. Hydroponic gardens are essentially soil free gardens that use nutrient rich water to grow plants.

Hopefully, with help from the community and with the approval of Mixon's grant applications, the kinder-garden will continue to grow.

The kinder-gardeners at South Fork Elementary may not be large in size, but they sure do manage to produce a large crop. The 1,900-square-foot garden, with its enthusiastic workers and strong leadership, is well on its way to producing a record breaking crop.