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November
7, 2005 
VOL.
43, NO. 19Oakland,
CA
A garden of learning blossoms in Lafayette
In 1999, Monette Meo, a new classroom aide at St. Elizabeth
School in Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, heard six words that
changed her life forever – “We’re going to the garden
now.”
Meo still recalls how “the kids’ faces lit up” after
hearing their teacher’s announcement. As she walked with the group
through the iron-latticed gate into the garden, Meo understood why.
She saw the profusion of red peppers, cherry tomatoes, white honey suckle
blossoms, purple English lavender, and a little green hummingbird flitting
about. She saw the whimsical Cobb bench that looked like a laughing dragon.
The long and short of it: Monette Meo fell in love with St. Elizabeth’s
Garden of Learning.
Her enchantment deepened as she began to see the garden as a teaching
template not only for science, but also for religion, ecology, art, history,
sociology, and as a tasty allurement to coax kids off the fast-food track.
She helped the students harvest tomatoes, peppers, onions and herbs to
make salsa for the whole school.
She also joined with the children during their art class as they meditated
on the prolific goodness of the Creator, painting their prayers with watercolors.
Meo learned to simply bask in thankfulness to the Creator for being so
present and alive through butterflies, strawberries, and the tall redwood
tree that watched over the garden.
As her enthusiasm expanded, Meo knew she wanted to help give birth to
a lovely garden just like this one. And it needed to be at her own children’s
school – St. Perpetua in Lafayette.
Monette Meo has succeeded. Today, St. Elizabeth’s seven-year-old
Garden of Learning has a new sister atop a grassy hill on Hamlin Road
across the road from St. Perpetua Church.
The achievement, however, took participation from a host of parishioners,
including Marilyn Sibley, chair of the Student Enrichment Education Support
(SEEDS), a parents’ fundraising effort to support science and arts
programs at St. Perpetua School.
Sibley agreed with Meo that a school garden needed to be incorporated
into the curriculum – eventually. When there was money for it. (St.
Elizabeth’s is funded through the Franciscan Office of Justice,
Peace and the Integrity of Creation, foundation grants and private donations.)
Meanwhile, Meo began taking master gardener classes in Berkeley and Richmond
so she’d be ready when it was time to create the garden.
Then one day, Meo had an ‘aha’ moment – why not start
a café on Friday morning to support the garden? Since an on-site
catering room was already available for the hot lunch program, why couldn’t
it be opened a few hours earlier to provide organic lattes, teas and home-baked
goods for parents dropping off their kids and for parishioners attending
the 8 a.m. Mass?
Marilyn Sibley loved the idea. So did Father John Kasper, parochial administrator.
So did Meo’s husband, Greg, a roofer, builder and consummate handyman
who had been poised in the wings for a go-ahead on the garden.
In September 2003, Café Perpetua opened with the motto, “Building
a garden… one cup of coffee at a time.” Proceeds began pouring
in. In January 2004, Father Kasper and principal Kathleen Radecke gave
their permission to start the garden on a 40-feet by 40-feet plot of parish
land across the road from the church.
Bringing the garden forth from scratch was not easy. “The place
looked like a cemetery for such a long time. The soil was hard as a rock,”
said Meo, remembering how painfully daunting it was when she and her husband
began digging fencepost holes. But they did it, with the help of their
son, Michael, now a senior at De La Salle High School in Concord.
While Greg Meo hauled in amended dirt and built raised wooden beds using
donated recycled, Brazilian wooden decking, a regular group of SEEDS volunteers
continued to bake shortbread and whip up quiches and frittatas to sell
at the cafe.
One August morning in 2004, with temperatures hovering at 105 degrees,
Meo planted the first little seedlings in the garden so they would be
up and growing when the children started school a few weeks later. She
and her husband single handedly maintain the garden, “But that’s
okay. We love it,” she said.
When the garden began producing its bounty, the SEEDS crew made pasta
and pesto sauces from the crop of tomatoes and basil, putting them up
in jars for sale each Friday. When the zucchini crop roared in with its
predictably overzealous enthusiasm, the women created a creamed soup as
well. Fresh vegetables from the garden are also available for sale each
Friday.
Adding these items has upped Café profits considerably, to between
$300-$500 each week, said Meo. The money goes for start-up costs, such
as purchasing trees, tools and other supplies. At a later date, when the
garden has everything it needs to operate, Meo hopes to use the café
funds to help other schools start gardens
Besides its cash income, the garden has a handy crop of volunteers outside
the kitchen. One parishioner, an anonymous “garden angel,”
has supplied wooden tables for the area, as well as a regular stipend
to cover ongoing needs. Parish Eagle Scouts helped construct the tool
shed, compost bin, a brick floor and worktable inside the green house.
Last year, when the kindergarten class was reading “Peter Rabbit,”
one youngster’s grandma created a replica of “Mr. McGregor’s
Scarecrow.” It nestles in the garden’s Peter Rabbit section,
complete with a bunny house and statue of the world’s most famous
cottontail.
If there is room for fantasy in the garden, there is also designated space
for prayer. Greg Meo constructed a “prayer wall,” modeled
after the Western (Wailing) Wall in Jerusalem, where children can write
their petitions on paper and stuff them into cubbyholes.
As for history, science, art, and sociology, the garden bears the fruits
of numerous student efforts, with Monette Meo and St. Perpetua’s
teachers collaborating to bring a “touching it, feeling, hands-on
experience” of learning.
Last year, for example, when the fourth graders were studying California
history, they painted scenes of various happenings and events on river
rock stones. Since there were 300 stones to go around, all the art classes
participated as well.
These colorful artifacts now line the pathway throughout the garden.
The junior high science students made pesto sauce last spring, and put
up 76 quarts of minestrone, “all vegetables from the garden,”
11-year-old Paul Russell Kneitz II, noted proudly.
The cooking project was one of those “hands on” ways for the
kids to follow the growth of vegetables and herbs from seedlings all the
way to the dinner table. Other science projects have included learning
how to save seeds from annuals, practice recycling, and do seed propagation.
For a renewable energy project, the sixth grade science class learned
how to build a solar-powered waterfall and a pond.
In other areas of study, seventh grade social studies students created
a mosaic with bits of tile during their study of the Byzantine period
of European history. They did the outline. Monette Meo filled in the center
with her own painting of St. Perpetua, modeled after one hanging in the
new Los Angeles Cathedral.
“If we had tried to do everything in mosaics, they’d still
be working on it,” she chuckled.
Kathleen Radecke, St. Perpetua’s principal, is one of the garden’s
strongest supporters. “It is a living laboratory which enhances
all areas of our curriculum by providing an outside classroom environment
for learning to be good stewards of the earth on a daily basis,”
she said. “Students are able to experience what they are studying
in the classroom.”
This year, Meo plans to deepen the garden science curriculum, bringing
it into every class. She already has verma (worm composting) in the kindergarten
through fourth grades and vows that every grade will soon have the wiggly
creatures living in its classrooms.
The kindergarteners recently watched two caterpillars give rebirth to
themselves as monarch butterflies. It was lunchtime, but the kids couldn’t
stay away from the little jar, as they watched the symbol of Resurrection
manifest. A third caterpillar didn’t make it. Meo and a visitor
watched anxiously, verbally coaxing the little creature to get unstuck
from its cocoon.
Meo took the butterfly home with her over the weekend in hopes that it
would emerge intact. It didn’t. “It was such a small thing,
but actually it wasn’t,” she reflected sadly.
She is passionate about everything related to the garden.
With the shortage of oil looming upon the world, she is determined that
the next generation learn how to become self-sufficient growers of food,
and to know where their produce comes from. She advocates eating locally
grown food as much as possible.
Last winter, when she noticed several students bringing peaches to school
for their lunch, Meo used it as a teaching moment. “It’s not
peach season. So they probably came from South America,” she told
them, pointing out how much fossil fuel it took to fly the fruit to California.
Her messages are taking hold, at all levels, whether they involve local
food, or garden critters, or nature itself.
Meo says that during recess, and after school, kids gravitate to the garden,
to bask in its peacefulness or to help weed and water.
Sixth grader Emily Balczcwski, 11, and her brother, Ian, 13, an eighth
grader, volunteered to water the garden for a week this summer while Meo
was on vacation. It took over an hour every day, but they didn’t
care, said Emily.
“It’s so peaceful to be here, thinking of how God created
everything that is here.” Meanwhile, Emily has learned to love zucchini.
“I was never fond of it until Mrs. Meo made her zucchini bread.”
Emily Leach, also 11, loves to hang out in the garden to hear the peaceful
sound of the solar waterfall she and her class helped build. And there
is the bonus of harvesting. “The strawberries and tomatoes here
taste better than candy.”
Monette Meo is hoping to hear these youngsters’ words multiply into
a larger chorus of voices from other Catholic schools in the Oakland Diocese.
Last April, she and Katherine Webb, the teacher at St. Elizabeth’s
Garden of Learning, made a presentation at a meeting of principals. The
response was “excellent,” said Meo.
Since then, contingents of teachers have been showing up for tours. And
local pre-school kids are beginning to visit as well. When they arrive,
Meo reads them a garden story, then takes them on a grazing tour to eat
strawberries or zucchini or “whatever’s in season.”
The new revised diocesan curriculum guidelines include environmental studies
and stewardship of the earth as good teaching tools for science, said
Holy Names Sister Barbara Bray, director of curriculum development for
the School Department.
The expanse of the Garden of Learning bursts with its plants of corn, tomatoes, zucchini and other vegetables in the raised wooden beds. Flowers also blossom in planter containers.
Students visiting the garden take a close look at the different vegetables growing there.
The painting of St. Perpetua in the center of a mosaic has a prominent place in the garden.
CHRIS DUFFEY PHOTOS
