Garden Club teaches children that vegetables come from the ground, not from the supermarket

Anne Hosier

Saturday, Feb. 21, 1998 | 3:54 a.m.

Where does the food in our pantries and refrigerators come from?

Brenda Cloud, a vocational instructor for the Nevada Cooperative Extension's 4-H clubs, posed this question to a group of kids in her afterschool program one day, and was surprised at some of their answers.

"Hamburger comes from ham," one child responded.

And ham, where does that come from?

Same place eggs come from:

"Easter."

When the subject turns to the origins of vegetables, their answers are only slightly more accurate.

"They say 'the grocery store,' " says Yvonne Disman, a master gardener with the Nevada Cooperative Extension.

Still, "a lot of (them) don't know where vegetables come from."

With our growing urbanization and increasingly efficient methods of mass food production, answers like these are probably to be expected.

But Disman, who grows most of her own vegetables and knows firsthand the pleasures of biting into a ripe tomato plucked fresh from the garden, wants to give local kids a chance to rediscover their agricultural roots.

So starting next month, she'll be heading a new 4-H garden club to teach them how to plant, tend and harvest desert native and heirloom vegetables.

The club, which is free and open to kids ages 5-18, will meet at the water district's Desert Demonstration Gardens around four times a month.

"There are a lot of kids who don't have a yard and aren't able to garden," Disman says, standing near the raised beds inside the garden where the kids will plant their vegetables. She tells the group of interested participants who have gathered on this sunny morning:

"It's going to be a learning experience for all of us."

Celeste Jovanovich, 13, hopes to learn more about organic gardening. Jovanovich subscribes to Organic Gardening magazine and tends her own plot at home, but still struggles with the vagaries of desert gardening. "It's a challenge, because there's not a lot of water and it's hot," she says.

And then there's those unwelcome visitors.

"Sometimes the cats will come and sit on my zucchini. They've squashed my squash." And sometimes they'll make reparations by leaving her presents.

"I don't like finding little dead birds in there."

Twelve-year-old Cody Shrum lost the battle in his garden to his cats. "They dug up all the plants," he says grimly. But Shrum is ready to try again with Disman's help. Gardening, he says, is a good opportunity to be "out in nature."

Thomas Nishi, 6, glances enthusiastically around the quiet sanctuary filled with budding fig, pistachio, almond and peach trees, a diverse selection of herbs and a Japanese rock garden. Something in the corner catches his eye. "You have a scarecrow!" he exclaims.

Right now, the bedraggled burlap scarecrow hasn't got much to watch over in the garden beds, besides a few raggedy patches of mesclun, some purple cabbage and a clump of clover.

But that will change.

"All this stuff is going to get pulled out," Disman tells the kids. "We'll start with the planting and when that gets done we'll do the weeding."

If all goes well, the beds will soon be bursting with tender young shoots of aromatic cilantro, parsley and sweet basil, sinewy vines bearing bright squashblossoms and frilly green plants whose fruit will ripen into succulent tomatoes in shades of purple, orange, black and green.

Come summer, there will be tender lettuce, carrots and high stalks of sweet corn for the kids to take home for supper, or show at the county and state fairs.

All of the vegetables will be grown organically, and all will be either native types or fashionable heirloom varieties -- the kind that currently fetch astronomical prices in specialty markets and catalogues such as Williams Sonoma.

"I notice in the grocery store they're like $4.99 or $6.99 a pound!" Disman says of the tiny yellow pear-shaped tomatoes she grows at home. "And they're so easy to grow!"

Unlike the hybrid, mass-produced vegetables found in most grocery stores, the seeds of which will not yield similar offspring (they'll either yield nothing, or a fruit resembling one of the parent vegetables), heirlooms have "true seeds" that can be replanted. They also come in an astounding array of shapes and colors.

"If you buy a tomato at the grocery store, they're kind of tasteless, and they have a thick skin so they're easy to ship," Disman says. "Heirlooms are not that way. They're different colors ... they have a green (type of tomato), they have a rainbow-colored one, and they all taste different." Some are shaped like lemons, others like tiny pears. All have a specific, traceable history, at least a half-century old.

For the initial planting, Disman selected around a dozen kinds of native vegetables and around 30 types of heirlooms that will grow well in the desert environment. "It's going to be hit and miss," she says. "If something doesn't work one year, you try it another way."

The huge heirloom watermelons she selected feature dark green skins marked with a unique yellow "moon and star" pattern. These will be planted among the sweet Mojave corn, a native Southwest variety, and beans similar to the kind carried over the infamous "trail of tears" death march by the Cherokee Indians a century ago. This is the way the Indians who lived along the Colorado River used to plant, Disman says.

Besides learning techniques of desert gardening, the kids will have a chance to explore the histories of the heirlooms.

But even more importantly, they'll learn where their salad comes from.

"I think many of the skills people look at as old-fashioned or gender-biased -- like cooking for girls -- are important," Cloud says. "And they're skills people have lost because we have so many prepared foods."