Down-and-dirty lesson
At Concord farm, much can be learned while helping to feed the hungry
Seventh-grade social-studies teacher Marc Lewis last month made a deal with the boys in his class that they could not resist.
"Work hard for an hour," Lewis told the boys, "and then you can roll in the dirt."
Granted, it's an unusual bargain. But this was an unusual lesson plan. The class from the R.J. Grey Junior High School in Acton was spending the morning working in the gardens at Gaining Ground, a nonprofit organization in Concord that grows organic produce for donation to Boston-area meal programs and food pantries.
Lewis's social-studies class was just one of many volunteer groups that will spend time assisting Gaining Ground's small staff this season as it maintains two gardens whose harvest will feed hundreds of needy people in Massachusetts.
Under the guidance of garden coordinator Verena Wieloch, volunteers do a variety of chores, including transplanting cuttings and building fences. There are countless hours of weeding to be done, as well as picking and pruning.
But Gaining Ground is about more than just the good - hearted efforts of volunteers. As administrative coordinator Emily Wheeler explained, in addition to providing food for the hungry, the organization is teaching people about how food is grown, cultivated, and distributed.
Many volunteers arrive at the farm in groups -- Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, classes such as Lewis's, after-school clubs. For others like Susan Haering and her two children, who have been putting in time in the gardens for the past four years, it's a parent-child activ ity.
"We've been volunteering at the gardens since my kids were 4 and 5 years old," Haering said. "We've done everything from planting seeds to weeding to harvesting tomatoes to pulling bugs off plants to picking flowers. The kids learn so much about growing things, and there's the additional benefit of meeting the other volunteers. We've worked with teens from the suburbs, with kids from inner-city programs, and with mentally disabled adults."
Wieloch and her fellow staff member, Lisa Heffley, are experts at finding a task to meet every ability. During the last week in May, volunteers who visited the gardens included a group of disabled adults from the Walnut Street Center in Somerville, a dozen teenagers from the Middlesex School in Concord, Lewis's class and one other from the R.J. Grey Junior High School, and a small group of home-schooled children.
"The farmers at Gaining Ground have great little lessons for the children," said Claudine Kaplan of Lexington.
A former schoolteacher who now organizes service projects for children who are home-schooled, Kaplan has been taking youngsters ages 6 to 12 to Gaining Ground for the past three years.
"It's such a beautiful place, " she said, "and the children spend a lot of time playing and finding the joy in the work. As well as learning to grow food organically, we build a lot of math lessons around farming: The staff has the children count seeds, measure out how many to plant where, and do word problems concerning how to divide the harvest."
Gaining Ground was founded in 1994 on privately owned land in Concord. Five years later, the group moved its primary operations to the current location on Virginia Road, leasing the land from the Town of Concord. The 9-acre parcel adjoins Henry David Thoreau's birthplace and has been farmed for more than 350 years -- a fact that Wieloch draws upon when explaining crop rotation.
"How would you feel if you'd been doing the same thing for 350 years?" she asked Lewis's seventh-graders. "Tired, right? That's why we have to plant flowers this year on a plot where we grew vegetables last year -- so that the soil doesn't get tired."
Lewis's students found that explanation useful after asking why they were transplanting sunflowers -- a task that previously did not seem related to hunger relief.
In addition to its main plot on Virginia Road, Gaining Ground also operates a smaller garden at the Old Manse in Concord. In all, according to Wieloch, the gardens contain 300 varieties of vegetables, fruits, herbs, and flowers.
Participants who dig their hands into the fertile organic soil of Gaining Ground tend to get hooked on the experience quickly. Wheeler told of one young teenager who did a service project in preparation for his bar mitzvah -- and consequently requested that his bar mitzvah guests make donations to Gaining Ground in lieu of traditional gifts. Last year, the organization logged 4,200 volunteer hours during its six-month season of operation.
For Lewis, whose field trip was funded through a state Department of Education Living Democracy grant, the time spent working on the farm cemented a lesson he had been teaching his students all year.
"I started the school year by introducing them to an Abbie Hoffman quote: 'Democracy is not something you believe in. Democracy is something you do,' " Lewis said. "Throughout the year, we've looked at ways that ordinary people throughout US history have taken action in order to better the lives of others. And we've focused particularly on issues of food and world hunger.
"In preparation for the trip to Gaining Ground, I brought to class an apple I'd bought at a local supermarket. It was grown in New Zealand. The kids mapped out the whole process through which the apple was planted and harvested in New Zealand, transported by land to an airport, flown to the US, trucked to the supermarket in Acton. Then they see the pounds and pounds of organic produce being produced at Gaining Ground for local consumption, and the whole relevance on a global ecological scale of growing food locally suddenly comes to life for them."
Organizations to which Gaining Ground provides fruits and vegetables include food pantries and soup kitchens in Ayer, Bedford, Cambridge, Concord, Somerville, Sudbury, and Westford. As Wheeler noted, fresh produce can be rare at a food pantry, where canned and boxed goods with long shelf lives are the norm. The rule for Gaining Ground crops is that food is transported no more than 20 minutes from the farm and is distributed no more than 24 hours after it is harvested.
"We serve the community in two ways," Wheeler said. "We help feed the hungry, and we also provide a way for volunteers to become part of the process. People from the suburbs and the city alike love learning about gardening."
And 13-year-old boys love dirt, as Lewis learned last month.
"Eventually, we worked it out so that for 20 minutes spent working, they could spend a minute playing in the mud," Lewis said. "And, honestly, I'd make that exchange with them any day.
"In the future, as they go to high school and beyond, they'll spend plenty of time fund-raising for worthy causes, but it was really important to me that they have this early exposure to service, learning in a way that got their hands dirty -- literally." 