Growing up in the Bronx, Sis and I had never heard of kohlrabi but we liked crunchy radishes. Then we enrolled in the summer gardening program at our local elementary public school and learned how to grow both kohlrabi and radishes, along with beans and carrots and corn and Swiss chard. It was so much fun and kept us busy three days a week from late June until the end of August.
Big city school garden projects
Bear in mind, we were born long after Victory gardens flourished in public and private places during the WWII period. Through the late 1970s, school gardens were part of a community gardening movement to bring "agriculture" to urban settings. Even earlier in New York City, school and park gardens were set up for children to learn more about nature and get involved in growing food.
My husband remembers participating in a school garden program in Cleveland, where he grew up. That program had its roots in the early 1900s, and continued until big budget cuts forced closure before 1980.
Beans, bugs, and bug juice
Sis and I were city kids, living in an apartment building one block from a huge park with two playgrounds. Until the garden program, the closest we got to radishes in the raw was seeing them in the local grocery store.
Our school garden was a fenced-in plot adjacent to the concrete yard where we students played during recess when school was in session. The fence was tall, more than eight feet high, not just to keep out critters but I suspect to discourage anyone from plucking some of our garden bounty.
On summer Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, about a dozen students gathered around the kindly gardening teacher, Mr. Wilson, as he patiently explained the business end of a hoe, calmed us when a bee buzzed by, and offered a cool drink of "bug juice" (maybe Kool-Aid or similar). We raked, created straight rows, put seeds in the ground, pulled weeds, learned about insects, and after weeks of weeding and waiting, we harvested fresh veggies with pride.
Our family enjoyed the radishes and beans and other familiar veggies . . . but how Mom figured out what to do with the kohlrabi, I'll never know. Um, I wouldn't put it on my plate, let alone in my mouth. But my memories of summers at the local school garden are as fresh as those snappy red radishes we grew.
Did your school have a garden? Wish I had a photo of ours...nobody thought to snap a shot of something we took for granted.
