At East Meadow's Barnum Woods, garden comes to life

Barnum Woods Elementary School in East Meadow is showcasing a brand new vegetable garden, allowing students in its garden club to raise crops and take them home to eat.

“We’re very excited about this,” Melody Schiller, a teacher at Barnum Woods and head of the garden’s planning and management team, said. “It’s been a long time coming.”

The new garden was created in partnership with Reworld, formerly known as Covanta Energy, an environmental company that focuses on sustainability, waste management and recycling. The company is based in Westbury.

The school’s staff members wanted to create a garden for the students for many years, according to Schiller, but they ran into several obstacles, like finding the right soil, crop irrigation and selection of plants. The garden that Reworld has constructed at the school has three garden beds with trellises, a hydroponics and lighting system and fans for temperature control. Hydroponics is a technique of growing plants using a water-based nutrient, rather than soil.

“Usually, they’re only able to see and grow one small plant,” Schiller said of Barnum’s garden club students. “Now they see how plants interact, how to make use of space, and how to sustain planting(s). They can see how to go from planting to harvesting, and all the things that are required to grow healthy food.”

For the new garden, planting season began about a month ago, and some of the plants have begun to produce vegetables — tiny cucumbers are sprouting on the vines, the first of many crops that will be harvested.

Some of the lessons that come with participation in the club are “understanding the importance of having food locally grown, instead of bringing it in from other areas, the impact on the environment, and learning about eating healthy,” according to Lisette Pelligrino, a teacher at Barnum and the club’s overseer.

The students must decide how they want to organize the garden, using research skills to determine how to organize the garden to maximize sunlight exposure and minimize overcrowding. Even if parts of the garden do not survive, the procedure provides a valuable learning experience.

“If it doesn’t work, then next year we know we have to plant differently,” Pelligrino said. “I tell them, ‘it’s like a laboratory.’ I like to create opportunities for them to learn something new, and as the program grows, there’ll be more interesting things that I can bring to the table for them.”

In June, the school will hold a formal ribbon-cutting ceremony, unveiling the student garden to the East Meadow community. “Their families are going to be invited also so that they can see the fruits of their work,” Pelligrino said of parents of children in the club

Crops being grown include peas, green beans, carrots, tomatoes, eggplants, and more, with harvests expected in the spring and fall. The vegetables are grown without pesticides, by using marigold flowers to deter pests, which makes it a self-sustaining ecosystem.

“We pretty much wanted to make something that was from start to finish that the kids can go ahead and utilize,” Fiori Iadevaia, Reworld’s safety and health program manager, said. “The main goal is that we wanted the kids to be successful from start to finish, meaning from planting a seed and seeing what can happen towards the end.”

Reworld has built other gardening facilities at East Meadow High School and Meadowbrook Elementary School, and other schools are showing interest in future projects. In addition to building the gardens, Reworld provides active support for gardens to assist students as they continue to work with the plants after the garden installation. 

“We just didn’t build it and install it and say that was it,” Iadevaia said. “We want to give support throughout the entire year for this project and make sure it’s successful for the kids.”

“We look forward to returning and building, making it better, (and) not just walking away,” Maureen Early, Reworld’s lead communications affairs specialist, said.

Creating gardens at multiple schools can build a sense of community, Early added.

“As we develop this project at various schools, maybe we could have a competition between Barnum and Meadowbrook,” Early said. “Who can grow the biggest watermelon, just to kind of entice the kids and make it more fun, add a little competitive spirit?

“Our community outreach is different from most companies,” she added. “We don’t just write checks directly. At Reworld, we become one with our partners in the community. The enthusiasm that this project has brought to these young children and the administration at the school has been second to none.”