A.E. Araiza / Staff
Outdoor teacher Leza Carter prepares the soil for new planting with the help of fourth-graders Enrique Pinedo, 9, and Ernesto Carranza, 10.

Working in school's garden thrilling for Lawrence students

It was cold enough to see your breath, but the kids outside Lawrence Intermediate School didn't mind a bit. They were too busy hunting for blue corn, picking peppers, studying a praying mantis and listening to a thrasher sing in their desert garden.

Leza Carter, an outdoor teacher at Lawrence, takes the students out of their classroom to spend time in the garden. Twelve students were happily working in it on a cold morning in December, for example.

When Kaylee Travis, a 10-year-old student at Lawrence, was asked what she liked best about the garden, she held her arms way out at her side and yelled, "Everything!"

"It's the best thing in the world to have at a school," she said. "You can grow lots of plants and get lots of different animals to visit that you can learn about."

The garden at Lawrence is really three different gardens for vegetables, wildflowers and pollinating plants that attract birds and butterflies.

Lawrence is just off the Pascua Yaqui Tribe's reservation on the Southwest Side of Tucson, near Valencia Road and Camino de Oeste. The elder members of the Yaqui, or Yoeme, tribe give advice on what to grow. Soon the children will be interviewing the elders to find out what they should grow in a new garden of medicinal plants.

But for now, they have plenty of plants to work on. In the vegetable garden alone, they grow corn, beans, squash, carrots, cabbage, turnips, broccoli, Anaheim peppers and pumpkins.

A vegetable garden requires lots of work and water, but there are other, simpler gardens for your school to try. A pollinator garden is much easier to take care of because native plants like chuparosa and desert honeysuckle are used to our hot, dry weather and don't need much attention.

Start small and, little by little, someday your school could have a desert garden like the one at Lawrence.

All content copyright 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 AzStarNet , Arizona Daily Star and its wire services and suppliers and may not be republished without permission. All rights reserved. Any copying, redistribution, or retransmission of any of the contents of this service without the expressed written consent of Arizona Daily Star or AzStarNet is prohibited.