Roman, a student at the Commodore Sloat School in San Francisco, kneels in the garden and runs his fingers across the leaves of a plant that looks, to the untrained eye, like a yellow daisy.

“This is Cape weed,” says the 8-year-old, rising suddenly. “We try to get rid of it, but it just keeps popping up, like a monster!” He jumps up and down to demonstrate.

Roman tells me Cape weed comes from Cape Town, a South African city whose climate is similar to San Francisco’s, which is why it’s taking over. Today, Roman’s classmates are sheet mulching. That is, they’re laying down cardboard covered by wood chips on the ground to prevent the weed from sprouting. It’s pretty advanced gardening—a far cry from the old avocado pit in the Styrofoam cup I remember from grade school.

Each week, the students at the K-5 public school take a 45-minute class on organic farming in the Learning Garden. They grow more than a dozen varieties of vegetables, herbs, and fruits in a 15' x 15' raised bed in the middle of a concrete courtyard, and on several feet of terraced hillside at the back of the campus. On this spring afternoon, the drip irrigation system that keeps the plot hydrated during school vacations has been partially dismantled so the kids can learn how to keep the plants alive by hand. Second-graders swarm over every inch of the bed, carefully tilting recycled juice jars full of water over plant stalks and watching the brown earth turn black with moisture.

The Commodore Sloat Learning Garden is part of a growing trend to get children back to the land. Parents and teachers, particularly in California, have started school gardening programs like Sloat’s to teach kids everything from life sciences to responsibility.

It’s an idea so old it’s new again. Up until the 1920s, the United States was a mostly agrarian society. Kids learned about the environment by milking cows and shoveling hay. They didn’t have to read a textbook explaining a plant’s life cycles, or the birds and the bees. They could see those things in nature all around them. Even as society became increasingly industrialized and more people moved to cities, many families continued to be stewards of the land in small backyard vegetable patches. During World War II, you were considered unpatriotic if you didn’t harvest vegetables from your Victory Garden to send to the Allied troops. Sons and daughters of suburbia tried their hand at farming on communes during the hippie era. And countless children of the ’70s grew up with cornstalks in their backyard—planted after their parents read Frances Moore Lappé’s seminal 1971 Diet for a Small Planet, a primer in ecologically conscious eating.

But times have changed. “When we first grew peas,” says parent Chris Leishman, who started the Sloat Learning Garden three years ago, “the kids had never seen one that wasn’t frozen.”

Increasingly few kids even see those. Since the 1970s, the American family has been eating more packaged and restaurant food and cooking fewer meals from scratch. These factors, combined with sedentary lifestyles, have caused the current epidemic levels of childhood obesity and diabetes.

The concept of a learning garden was first seeded two decades ago by Berkeley chef Alice Waters. Her Edible Schoolyard, perhaps the best-known program of this kind, is the model for many schools. In 1985, Waters, who founded the restaurant Chez Panisse and is widely credited with inventing California cuisine, built a facility at Martin Luther King Middle School in Berkeley that includes a chicken coop, a brick pizza oven, and a cozy kitchen where kids cook what they grow, then eat a sit-down meal together. (They’re required to have a civil conversation at the table, too. If they’re at a loss for words, they can pick a provocative question out of a box of cards.)

In-school gardening programs give children a feeling of connection to the earth, access to and a taste for healthy food, and the ability to grow it. With the death of the family farm and the rise of big agribusiness, teaching kids about how food moves from pasture to plate is more important now than it has ever been.  

Commodore Sloat is a typical urban school: short on funds and open green space, save the hearty shrubs that encircle its perimeter. When Leishman decided to start a garden, she and three teachers asked the school district if they could take over the yard’s big cement planter, home to two Cyprus trees slowly dying in rock-hard soil.
After assuring administrators that the garden would be tended to even during school holidays, parents and teachers chipped in to pay $400 to remove the trees, buy wood to reinforce the retaining walls of the bed, and rent a rototill to churn up the earth. Because watering vulnerable sprouts using the school’s high-pressure plumbing system would have blasted them into oblivion, the group raised another $1,000 for the drip irrigation setup by selling bulbs.