Mini-Gardens Planned, With Maximum Reach

Kids at two New Haven K‑8 schools are beginning to grow veggies in their classrooms, as part of a crusade to bring bounties of natural foods to confined places.

It’s a worldwide crusade, called The Growing Connection. A UN-affiliated program, it sends specially designed containers and know-how to schools in poorer countries like Ghana, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic. Kids learn firsthand how to grow food in a box you can fit on a desk. The soil-filled boxes are designed to enable people to grow two and a half times as many greens or tomatoes as you can usually produce in that space. The idea is to encourage the kids to go home and help their families start their own gardens in cities or other crowded places where people normally wouldn’t think of ​“farming.”

That crusade has come to New Haven. Claire Criscuolo, owner of the renowned downtown natural-foods restaurant that takes her first name, brought the program to the attention of officials at the Liveable City Initiative and then the public schools. ​“That’s part of having a liveable city,” she reasoned — a city where people can afford to grow and eat organic food that’s good for them.

The school system’s Catherine Sullivan-DeCarlo put Criscuolo in contact with teachers and principals at two schools with new buildings and curricula that fit right in with the project’s goals: Barnard Environmental Studies Magnet School and Benjamin Jepson Interdistrict Magnet School.

The group linked up with the U.N. program, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. It has agreed to provide the boxes and technical training; and with People’s United Bank, which put up $2,000. Robert Patterson, who runs the program, said Wednesday that New Haven is fertile ground because of all the sustainability and organic-food projects that take place throughout town. ​“There’s a lot going on with the private sector and the green movement. That’s attractive to me,” he said.

Ten teachers at each school signed up to put boxes in their classrooms and start growing.

The boxes should arrive at Barnard, along with the program guides and soil and fertilizer, ​“in a couple of days,” said Marjorie Drucker, the school’s science coordinator. ​“We already started our seedlings.” The Barnard teachers and their students will grow broccoli, spinach and lettuce.

‘This will show children that even if you don’t have a lot of space, you can grow good food to eat,” Drucker said. She said she hopes the program ​“carries over to their home life: ​‘We can grow healthy vegetables to eat. We don’t have to eat potato chips to snack.”

Both schools involved already do outdoor gardening with their kids, so they were naturals to sign on. In addition to the teachers, volunteers like Bill MacMullen have helped get the program ready. (MacMullen, a city engineer, is shown in the photo at the top of the story bringing containers to Jepson with Claire Criscuolo.)

The program also aims to encourage entrepreneurship by encouraging kids to sell some of the produce, perhaps at farmers markets.

Long-term, Criscuolo (pictured in the kitchen of her restaurant) would like to see the program come to as many city schools as possible, as well as to support a possible farmers market of its own. She’d like to see New Haven schools develop a program like Food From The Hood, an L.A.-based effort that raises money for scholarships.

Criscuolo already buys some of the organic produce for her restaurant from a high-school gardening program, at Common Ground.

Overall, Criscuolo would like to help New Haveners think differently about the ground in our city. ​“We spend so much time growing green grass and putting toxic chemicals in the grass, instead of growing food.” With the help of a generation of New haven schoolchildren, that could change.