‘God’s Garden’ sprouts in synagogue parking lot

Students at Congregation Kol Ami’s Religious School have transformed a corner of the Reform synagogue’s parking lot into an organic vegetable garden.

At the start of the 2007-08 school year, Kol Ami Religious School teacher Steve Sackin proposed that his sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students create a garden. He gave them the choice of beginning it in a grassy area or the crumbling parking lot.

“They chose the much more challenging site in the parking lot,” Sackin said.

The challenges included breaking up asphalt, cutting logs and completing masonry work. The students also started compost piles and received a soil donation.

“The next thing you know, we had a garden,” Kol Ami member and gardener Dorothy Solomon said.

Solomon has been involved with the project since the beginning, helping students in the garden and giving advice about planting. She said that while she loves gardening, interacting with the students has been an even greater pleasure.

“I love the fact that (they) don’t treat me like an old lady,” Solomon said. “This is a neat bunch of kids.”

For the current harvest season, Solomon ordered seeds for popcorn and peanuts. She is proud of how the garden has evolved and how students have become involved with the project.

“Boys would do physical labor in the cold and rain,” Solomon said. “And girls are doing just as much work as the boys.”

The garden began as a 600-square-foot space, yielding peas, spinach, lettuce and other vegetables. Now, the garden measures 2,000 square feet, with a goal of expanding to 4,000 square feet. Other goals include creating a bioswale (Ed.  note: a landscape element designed to remove silt and pollution from surface runoff water) and an outdoor-classroom space.

“Stuff is growing like crazy,” Solomon said. “We have snow peas, sugar snap peas, potatoes, corn coming up ... the best strawberries, a bountiful crop of lettuce.”

‘They accomplished this’
The garden offers a connection to what students learn in class. During the first year, the class focused on ethics, creating what they describe as “Gan Elohim” or “God’s Garden” to help repair the world (“tikkun olam”). The second year involved the study of the development of Israel.

“(We) used the students’ experience restoring the land in the parking lot to explore the Israeli pioneers’ experience and their philosophy in their attempt to restore a country,” Sackin said.

The community has become involved in the students’ efforts by working with the students on Sunday mornings as they prepare the soil, weed and harvest. The students and congregation members have continued to work on Sundays during the summer.

Solomon said the city of Prairie Village has expressed interest in the garden, sending representatives to work at Kol Ami on Sundays in order to potentially use the garden as a model for other community gardens.

“Through (the students’) own hard work over the course of the school year, they accomplished this,” Sackin said. “I hope they got a sense of what they are capable of accomplishing.”

Renata Williams is an intern with Sun Publications, The Chronicle’s parent company.

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