By Megan Burke and Brian Myers
San Diego’s Crawford High School in City Heights is among the most culturally diverse schools in the nation. An innovative school garden program at the school gives students a chance to discuss their culture through food.
Kaley Hearnsberger is Crawford’s Youth Food Justice Coordinator. She runs the internship program, which pays students to work in the garden.
“While they’re working, they’re learning about gardening, about what it means to grow your own food, what it means to access land, to start a community garden and how eat healthy,” Hearnsberger said.
Video Transcript:
Kaley Hearnsberger: Our program is an internship program. Where we pay students to work in the garden and while they’re working they’re learning about gardening, about what it means to grow your own food, what it means to access land, to start a community garden, and how to eat healthy.
Perla Hernandez: My name is Perla Hernandez and I’m a senior at Crawford and I’m part of the garden. Where I learn how to compost.
Ntiriniga Etienne: My name is Etienne. I’m from east Africa, but I was born in countries in Central Africa, which is Burundi. But I grew up, like lived a long time in a camp in Tanzania.
Perla Hernandez: I would describe composting as recycling materials to create healthier soils for healthier plants.
Ntiriniga Etienne: The first when I learned what composting was, like, when I saw my mom used to do a compost. She used to do a compost for getting soil to go use them for growing vegetables.
Valerie Christinat: I enjoy composting because it’s fun to me and fascinating and I like learning new things about it. Before I joined the garden I had no idea anything about compost. But now I know what you do to it, how you turn it, what you add to it and why it’s so good to make your own compost that’s nutritious and organic. It helps your plants grow better.
Jan Wendt: We’re serving about, I don’t know, about 1300 kids a day for lunch. And about 600 come through the lines here and we have a salad bar in each line. And at the end of the day we take everything that’s left over and put it into a compost can.
Perla Hernandez: So we bring it back here to the garden and we work on it.
Valerie Christinat: So this top layer is mostly made of greens, which is fruits and vegetables. We also add browns and this is mostly carbon. And we need a nice even layer, so that it can break down easier.
Ntiriniga Etienne: When you have a garden, you grow your own food. And then you can sell and then you buy your own.
Kaley Hearnsberger: The students are really excited to take what they’ve learned in the garden home with them. And a lot of students have been able to take plants home to grow on their own and they’ve used the compost we’ve created soil out of to grow those plants at home. So it’s really cool to see and kind of come full circle.
Perla Hernandez: It is important because it helps our environment a lot and we recycle many materials on our campus. Which is good because there are less trash in our landfills, so I encourage every school to do it, too.