Finding a place for a garden at DeWitt Clinton

Background

This past school year, the Witt Seminar has succeeded at one of its most ambitious and visionary projects to date: the creation and establishment of a vegetable garden on the beautifully verdant campus of DeWitt Clinton High School. The garden was conceived as one component in a much larger effort to raise awareness especially among students in the Clinton community about food.

Inspired by films like Food, Inc. and Supersize Me, we wanted to engage our fellow students with some of the issues related to food production and consumption in our country and help expose them to the dangers and consequences of accepting and participating in a food industry that privileges profit over the health. In other words, we wanted students to be aware that much of the food they normally eat, even in our school cafeteria, is unhealthy. While there is much to criticize about fast food corporations and their ability to manipulate consumers into unhealthy eating habits, we felt it equally vital to provide and promote healthy slow food alternatives. What better way than to grow our own. Therefore, our main goal for last year's class was to start a garden.

We should mention at the outset that our plan to start a garden was enthusiastically embraced by the late Megan Charlop who served as Director of the Division of Community Health at Montefiore's School Health Program and envisioned an edible school garden in each of the 16 Bronx schools that house school-based health centers. With Megan’s encouragement, the Witt Seminar decided to devote the entire 2009/2010 school year to promoting healthy school food and eating habits among our students rather than holding what had become our annual Witt Seminar Conference on Activism, a conference that Megan along with numerous community activists participated in from 2005 through 2009. In subsequent blogs, we will outline our considerable success thus far in helping to raise food awareness at DeWitt Clinton.

Why not the courtyards?

Ours was not the first recent attempt to start a garden at DeWitt Clinton and like others before us we were first drawn to the school’s inner courtyards. After all, the courtyards can easily be perceived as the two-chambered heart of our school and therefore an enviable location for a school garden. Imagine our building: a large hollow rectangle, three stories of classrooms high that face into two large courtyards on either side of the central auditorium/library building. The two courtyards are a splash of green at the very center of the school building in a space shared only by structures that gather and house large numbers of students in assembly, study, or research. Perhaps in its original intention, the courtyards were envisioned to be a space where students in a school garden could be captivated by the working of sunlight and rain on growing plants. Just as the auditorium was designed to nourish our social being and the library designed to enrich our minds in culture and knowledge from books, the garden would sustain and nourish our bodies. Imagine the possibilities of an education in such a space!

The north courtyard already has splendid trees, especially an immense flowering dogwood. Just as students are about to graduate in the spring, the tree explodes in color. This courtyard is also home to the school’s only livestock: a lonely chicken that was allegedly rescued from the front of the building by one of the custodians. Who knows from whose dinner table or rooftop it escaped? There is also a greenhouse, no longer in use. When Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City, visited our Witt Seminar, we dreamed of creating a "chicken run" in this courtyard. Perhaps this still could become a reality someday.

The south courtyard, by contrast is almost completely empty except for a collection of dwarf evergreens that were planted by Clinton students who participated in the One Million Trees project. It is still, by most accounts, a neglected space often littered with paper, pens, abandoned notebooks and discarded textbooks. What a perfect space to reclaim!

Initially, it was our hope to place our garden in either or both of these courtyards and so we spent considerable time measuring and dreaming of how we might work to transform these spaces into their full potential. Just being within these enclosed environments was both thrilling and empowering. There is an eerie hush as sounds of students and teachers carrying on their business could be only faintly heard. When in the courtyards we are essentially inside the school but we are also outside as well, under the sun and sky.

The problem with the courtyards, however, resides in their accessibility. In order to access the north courtyard, a custodian must lead us down the circular stairs of the records office and through the custodian’s locker room. Perhaps there is a way to avoid the records office, but not the custodian’s space. At least this courtyard had a door. The south courtyard is presently accessible only through a supply room window. A ramp has been built to accommodate the opening, but it would not be a place to bring any large group of students on a regular basis.

We still feel that the courtyards are ideal places in our school to garden, but until major structural changes are made to allow access from, say the cafeteria, or at the very least through available and accessible doors, the spaces are too cumbersome to reach.

Discovering the ideal location to get our garden started

It is unusual for teachers or students to have much interaction with custodians and groundkeepers but from the moment we started planning the garden we have had to rely upon the custodians to open doors, turn on the water, and provide keys. Not only have the custodians helped us with whatever we have needed, they have also expressed a great deal of support for what we are doing. We have learned that the custodians of DeWitt Clinton are the greatest and, in the near future, we will dedicate an entire posting to sing their praises.

Jim Rafferty, the head custodian, first suggested the location for what we think is the perfect garden spot. A narrow bit of lawn, 96’ x 10’ that runs along the south side of the gym building. There is almost full sunlight except for the morning before the sun rises over the building. Beside the four evenly spaced ornamental cherry trees the spot is empty. The best part of the emptiness is that there is room for the garden to grow. Beside the lawn itself there is a wide sidewalk (for potted plants, tables, benches?) and a twenty foot fence separating the space on the south side from the faculty parking lot and on the west side from the track and football field. We envision the possibility of potted vines that will reach to the top of the fences to provide not only shade but some sense of privacy and enclosure for the garden.

On June 18 and 21 2010, the very last two days of school, Witt Seminar students Jorge, Gabriel, Karissa and Elizabeth along with Community Health Organizer for Montefiore Medical Center Jessica Moorman, student teacher Caroline Shephard and Witt Seminar teacher Ray Pultinas were able to plant the garden. Montefiore Hospital generously donated soil, raised beds, bags of peat and manure but it took time for the supplies to be delivered and the garden boxes to be built. Nonetheless we used the lasagna method of layering to prepare our garden beds.

Throughout this summer, Ray Pultinas, with help from his family, have been watering and tending the garden. It is presently abundant with squash, tomato, eggplant, cucumbers, onions, basil, and peppers and we expect a plentiful harvest by the time students return for the fall semester.