Teaching kids gardening in school doesn't work. The school year is broken up by summer break which coincides with the peak growing season. The original idea was that families needed their kids at home to work the fields and farms in the summer. Farming and gardening weren't on the curriculum because kids learned all they needed to know in the fields.
In a few generations skills that were once widespread and essential have languished. This group of kids would already have the calloused hands and the experience that comes from a life spent outdoors engaged in strenuous activities.

If I could teach these kids two things, the first would be the bond between a gardener and the land she works. It's a relationship that grows with time and patience - this love of the land. We care for the land and it cares for us.
The second would be to pay attention to the details. The garden has a million things to teach us, so much beauty and even drama to show us.
That's why I always try to start out by looking. These kids have sharp eyes and quick minds. This is a new garden and doesn't look like much at first. It would be easy to pass right by, noticing nothing.

We take the time to look closely.

Right away we find a mushroom. I teach the same lesson I taught to the last group about fungi and the role they play in the garden. Almost all plants have a relationship with one or more fungi, which perform most of the tasks we associate with roots, like mining minerals from the soil. They trade raw materials mined from the soil for carbon compounds photosynthesized by the plants. Take away the fungi and the plant growth slows incredibly and health deteriorates.
They also connect plants to each other. the classic example of this is Douglas Fir. If you can see this for yourself in our local forests. A Douglas fir that is cut down will often grow over the stump. It starts from the ouside where the living tissues are found. It rolls over the top of the stump and grows its way into the middle. The network of fungi enables the other trees to send the plant juices needed to create a bandage over the top of the stump. this is wrong - see Depart ment of Corrections
Fungi also have an amazing capacity for breaking down toxic substances like oil and other petroleum based polutants. they definitly deserve more credit for all the good wok they do hidden away in the dark of the soil. All an all they are one of the most underated (by humans that is) species on the planet.
Next week the mushrooms will be gone and an important lesson will no longer be conveniently close at hand. Everything has it season. The temporary nature of all garden props reminds me of Betty. I learned a lot about teaching gardening to youngsters from Betty Peck at the Saratoga community garden where I met Tinker and we made Sam.
Betty was awesome. She had beautiful silver hair and wore long flowing dresses. She had regal bearing and a flair for the dramatic. Her performances always captured the wandering imaginations of even the wee-est pre-schoolers. She was not a serious gardener, she was much too permissive. Her favorite plants acted out like a mob of unruly chilren and Betty had more favorite plants than there are stars.
While she was weak in garden rules and regulations, she excelled in garden magic. If there were any garden fairies to be found, Betty would bring them out . I swear, she someitmes brought them with her.
Now there are two kinds of magic: the kind that seeks to manipulate and control, and the kind that opens our eyes to everyday wonders that we are too busy or too flustered to see. When you try to force magic you get atom bombs and pornography, but if wait for the magic with an open heart and a little patience - it will alway come on its own. Whether you call it magic or god, we were put here to admire these wonders too fleeting and beautiful to explain.

Betty would scope out the garden beforehand and make her leasson plan. She would find all the best stages and props for illustrating the wonders of the garden. One week, when she came to one of her lesson spots, she found that someone had cut down one her favorite garden props and hauled it away to the compost.
It was the only time I ever saw Betty at a loss for words. Such agony and sorrow. If could have brought the plant back I would of - to heck with good gardening. Betty momentarily stepped out of character to mourn the loss of one of life's great lessons, conveniently illustrated close at hand. Much to her credit she was able to complete the garden tour and garner rave reviews from a discerning group of third graders.

One of the coldest, hardest facts of the garden is that all life comes out of death. Gardening is no task for the overly sensitive or faint of heart. As my friend Matty is so fond of saying: "I'm a gardener - I kill plants for a living. Underneath his flippant attitude lurks a deadly truth - for every plant a gardener plants he must kill dozens, sometimes hundred or thousands.
Gardeners are always saying good-by. Good-by to plants they have nutured from infancy, goodb-by to each season as if fades into the next, to the peaonie flowers, to the plum blossoms ...

I already know I'll miss these mushrooms growing under the Madrone tree. Madrones are dying in droves yet some stay perfectly healthy. Researchers are looking into the possibility that fungal networks connect Madrones to Douglas Firs and the Firs and fungi help the Madrones to survive and flourish.
Our Madrone is a long way from the nearest Firs but close to a fungus. I decide not to worry. I've never found that plants grow better when you worry about them. Just in case I might plant a Dougals Fir closer to our Madrone (my daughter's middle name is Madrone)

Mean while back at the garden: next we find a peppercress. They weren't even here last week or at least we didn't find any. We taste the pepercress and the concensus is that they suck. Once we find one, they magically appear all over the place. We have a phenomenol capacity for pattern recognition - a skill that should be exercised daily.

The stems have hairs on them. Hairs are one of the ways that plants protect themselves from chompping insects. All of our vegetables started as weeds. We bred many of the insect repelling properties out of the vegetables we eat. Often the same properties that repell insects repell us.
We pull up a peppercress to look at the roots. They remind me of those cool nodules that grow on the roots of legumes and fix nitrogen. Before I can whistle Dixie one of the kids has dug up a clover and we take a close look. Sure enough tiny nodules are forming already. They're hard to see, just barely visible. (we give ourselves major bonus points for spotting somehting so hard to see) The nodules are a good sign and a good omen for the garden.

Next we find a plant I call ground ivy and Sebastian calls somehting else, I can't remember what. Its Latin name is Glechoma hederacae. You can see what it lookis like for yourself by searching for it in Google images. We admire the tiny pink flowers and the square stems which indicate it is in the mint family. It doesn't smell or look like regular mint.
Really it smells sort of funky/musky like decades old cat pee when it rains and you're never quite sure whether you are really smelling it or not.

Then we find small, black spiders scurrying over the ground in a hurry. Some of us are afraid of spiders. One kid is afraid of dogs. It is such a wonderful spring day and we have such a short attention spans that our minds wander off in a thousand different directions. Sometimes the tangents are the best part of the day ... so many delightful tangents to take, it's hard to choose.

We find some more cool stuff, like deer prints, eagles soaring in lazy arches overhead and opium poppies mixed in with the scotch broom growing just outside of the garden. The poppies excite an inappropriate amount of interest on the part of the kids. They are totally blown away that opium poppies are growing like a weed, in their hometown. To these kids, this is some serious garden magic. One kid samples a bit of leaf - a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

Of course the poppy leaves in spring are no more potent than the white sap that leaks from lettuce stems when they are getting ready to go to seed. Lettuce sap is a mild opiate too.
Some of the kids remember seeing milky sap leaking from lettuce stems. That's a good sign. It means they are paying attention to the other living things they share the panet with.

I've been eyeing the shade of a nearby Madrone tree and considering the glories of a nap outside. I try ditch the kids on Sebastian and head for the shade, but before I get three steps, Sebastian reminds me of all of the next steps we have yet to figure out and soon.
I kiss that nap good-by. By this time the pain in my legs is excrutiating. I just got diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis. I'm taking these chinese herbs which help immensely sometimes. This week is a big not.
Without Sebastian I would be next to useless as a teacher for these kids. Talking only goes so far in the garden. Most garden skills are learned by osimossis. You work alongside someone and you absorb their stance, the rythhm of their movements, the way they touch the earth.

Sebastian has the elegance and economy of movement of an old hand at the gardening business. Though he is only a few years senior to these kids, he is an excellent role model.
I only wish they could spend a full year working with him. One time around the seasons, under the sun the rain and the wind, in the garden with Sebastian and these kids would be changed for life.

This week's group has one girl and the rest boys. That's an amazing amount of not-yet-ripe male energy all at once. Most of them take to sod busting with a will. With so many young men let loose all at once, progress is quick. There's a nice destructive energy to sod-busting that they find satisfying. They like to posture with their shovels. I enjoyed watching one or two fairly cool martial arts demonstrations.
While they work, they talk about cool stuff like chain gangs. I tell them about the chain gangs I saw traveling through the south as a kid. They were the real thing with chains, shotguns, mean-looking sheriffs and all-black convicts. They worked along highways hot enought to fry eggs on.
We all agreed that the old striped jail fashions were far superior to the orange jumpsuits they put you in now. No self-respecting criminal would be caught dead in an orange jumpsuit. Crime just doesn't pay like it used to.
Some of them have already taken their shirts off. They turn them into bandanas. Worn on the head so they look like pirate gear and around the neck like bandits. I always used to wear mine around my waste - it looked like a skirt - these guys are way cooler than that. For years I worried that my generation had already done all the coolest stuff when we were young. Fat chance.

We get a lot done considering it's such a short day. We hand dig around the rest of the fence. A neighbor comes by to ask why we didn't use a rotto-tiller. I don't have a convincing answer and he walks away shaking his head and muttering. We start cleaning out the flower beds by the entrance and I never did get that nap. There's always next week.