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From the Santa
Cruz Sentinel
January 27, 2005
Dominican
garden teaches life skills
Big things are happening in a small garden at Dominican Hospital Catholic Healthcare West. Employees, volunteers and students from Soquel High School are growing healthy food, teaching life skills through gardening and sowing seeds of health. Their recipe for success consists of soil, seeds, sun, water and a lot of community support.
From
dreams into reality
Early in 2003 Michael Raciti, storeroom coordinator for Dominican Food
Services, and James Ortiz, grill chef for Dominican Food Services, spent an
evening dreaming of how nice it would be to create a garden to beautify the
cafeteria area while providing organic herbs for use in the kitchen.
The idea was approved, and a 1000 square-foot piece of ground separating Dominican Oaks from the hospital grounds near the Behavioral Health Unit was chosen in April.
Raciti’s first challenge was to deal with the existing soil, a sandy top layer covering a hardpacked clay base. To compensate, Raciti designed the organic garden to use eight raised beds approximately 4 feet by 12 feet, with drip irrigation.
The original soil and 10 cubic yards of added compost blended to form a rich fluffy soil that began producing healthy crops for the cafeteria last summer.
Tomatoes, bell peppers, summer squash, carrots, onions and gourmet lettuce were a few of the items made available to the kitchen. Edible flowers such as bachelor buttons, zinnias and calendula were used as garnishes for special catering events. Perennial herbs, including sage, rosemary and lavender, were used at the grill.
Rainbow chard, carrots, radish, leeks and onions were all planted for winter harvest after each bed was refreshed with several wheelbarrows of compost.
Life
skill lessons
J.R. Wolf, a neighbor of Raciti’s, volunteered one weekend to help work in
the garden. Wolf caught Raciti’s enthusiasm and immediately saw how garden
projects could benefit the students he teaches in the functional life skills
class at Soquel High.
Wolf had been looking for community volunteer projects that would help students see how their education could transfer out of the classroom while giving them vocational experiences for their resumes. The garden and Wolf’s enthusiasm formed a synergistic combination igniting the students’ interest in learning.
During "Weed and Water Wednesdays," vocational students work in the garden, building horticultural skills such as how to create a compost pile, layout a garden, sow seeds, harvest and thin crops, save seeds and prune. The skills learned at the Dominican garden are carried back to the high school where the students are creating their own organic garden.
"The garden project allows students to see how classroom lessons transfer into real-life. Students value their education more when they understand the purpose of what they are learning," says Wolf.
Students utilized their math and geography education to develop a garden design based on the square-foot garden method. This design method attempts to maximize the plantable space from the available land.
"We are trying to give them job skills necessary for their future independence; or at the least, they can grow their own food. At the end of the year, students will have their own garden journal chronicling their lessons from the garden project," Wolf says.
Wolf utilizes each part of a growing cycle to teach.
The cooking class incorporates the harvest into menus teaching students the benefits of choosing fresh produce over processed foods. A number of harvested tomatoes were set aside for a lesson in seed saving teaching students how to collect, dry and store seeds properly for the next season.
Students experienced taking the responsibility of caring for plants by plantings and caring for an avocado seedling. After a few months, students were able to see how different amounts of care had resulted in different amounts of plant growth.
Community
involvement
While the organic crops were making their debut in the cafeteria, Sister
Mary Ellen Leciejewski, ecology program coordinator, began to notice some
unexpected ripples of health from the garden.
Dominican Oaks residents and hospital employees began extending their walks to include a pass by the garden to see the progress. During the warmer months, some employees found relaxation tending the garden during work beaks.
"For me, the import fact is that is that we recognize the connection between a healthy Earth and healthy human beings," she says. "If we don’t have a healthy planet, we won’t have healthy human beings."
Donations of time, materials and money have poured in from the community and employees. Leciejewski likes to say that "Everything for the garden project just keeps falling into place. It just feels like we are being carried along."
At one point, the students from the life skills class were lacking funds for bus fares. An employee willingly donated the necessary funds to keep the students coming. Other donations have included river rock, a toolshed, wine barrels and seeds.
Dominican Hospital has long been known as an environmentally responsible member of the community with its extensive program to recycle, reduce and redesign.
Abbie Blair, a member of the California Native Plant Society, has a degree in horticulture and has spent 25 years in plant and cut flower production, at one point operating a nursery in Gilroy. She lives on Mount Madonna and is waging hand to vine combat against the ivy and vinca displacing the native plants. Contact her at svreeken@santacruzwsentinel.com.
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