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Palo Alto Online

Garden of delights

by Jocelyn Dong

It started with a few hungry eyes, a garden full of corn and tomato plants, and little hands just itching to pick the fresh vegetables.

The only problem for those little hands, which belonged to children living on Dana Avenue in north Palo Alto, was that the tempting corn and tomatoes weren't growing in their own yards: The garden belonged to Karen Harwell, the kids' neighbor.

Lucky for them, Harwell was not only generous with her produce, but looking to spread her love of gardening as well. If the children enjoyed picking fruits and vegetables, she figured, why not enlist them to help tend it too?

Thus, the Dana Meadows Organic Children's Garden was born on Harwell's one-sixth-of-an-acre yard. In its three years of life, the garden has become a magnet for more than a dozen children, a place they call their own.

After school one damp April day, eight kids sat in Harwell's driveway on bales of hay covered by a shiny blue tarp. Her son Drew, the coordinator of the Stanford Community Farm, was giving a lesson on seeds. Wearing a large-brimmed bush hat, he squatted next to wooden boxes. Sprouts from beans, broccoli, deer-tongue lettuce, a variety of melons, onion and cucumber plants poked out of the dirt, evidence of a planting session a few weeks earlier.

"We've got lots of cool seeds today," Drew said, fingering packets of "moon and star" melon and cantaloupe seeds. "Seeds are magical. You take something so tiny like this, yet it produces a whole big fruit. It's amazing that it has all it needs."

"It's like a baby growing up," one boy offered.

Hands shot into the air as Drew asked for volunteers to help prepare the soil and plant cantaloupe and other seeds. After today, the kids will water the seeds every day on their way to school. Once the seedlings are mature enough, they will find a home in the garden next to eye-popping poppies, purple star-flowered borage (an herb) and 18 semi-dwarf fruit trees, including apples, navel oranges, plums and Bing cherries.

The garden also features a bird bath and a red and yellow "barn" birdfeeder, made by two of the girls and their dad.

"Karen's done a great thing for the kids of the block," said Kathryn Finley, mother to gardeners Ella, 6, and Doran, 4. "She's teaching kids a lot about gardening. When she's on vacation, she asks the kids to take care of things. They feel like this is their garden. They pass it to and from school. It's a big part of the neighborhood's life."

As with many farms, the children's comes with animals: three ducks, Webber, Sasha and Jemima; one Labrador retriever, Summer; and a swarm of bees, as yet unnamed, making honey in the backyard.

The children are becoming experts on all of them.

"Sasha's the most greedy one," Katie Layendecker, 9, said, referring to the two-year-old duck who has been hording the 25 eggs she's laid. "Jemima goes with the flow." "Webber always wants to tell people about his day," said sister Brooke, 7, as the male duck quacked cacophonously.

The kids also spout ecological principles. Katie helps Karen Harwell muck out the duck cage each week. She explained that the cage is filled with straw, and the dirty straw is moved to the garden where it fertilizes plants. Likewise, the small pond in the back is cleaned out weekly, and the water used on the plants.

Lauren Pendo displayed her knowledge of flowers, plucking two from plants and holding them in the palm of her hand.

"You can eat this one, and if you suck the end of this, it tastes like honey," she said, encouraging a visitor to try them out.

They've also learned about seasons -- planting in spring, harvesting in summer, pulling out the vegetation in fall and planting a winter ground covering.

Harwell has told the children that everything in the garden is half theirs, a fact that one mother especially appreciates.

Lisa Gerould, mom to Margot, 9, and little brother Bowen, called the garden "a third place" for the kids. "It's not home or school. It's nice, especially for the older kids. They get a sense of having a place away from their parents."

Kathy Layendecker, Katie and Brooke's mother, echoed the sentiments. "The kids are over every day doing something to maintain it. It really makes living here feel very special."

Work with the budding gardeners long enough, and gender differences become readily apparent: The boys like to dig up the soil and find the bugs; the girls would rather to cradle the duck eggs and see the plants grow. Everyone likes to taste the fruits of their labor.

Karen Harwell traces her love of gardens back to her own childhood. During World War II, her neighborhood planted a "victory" garden, and everyone came together to work on it, she recalled.

She enjoys having the kids around, since her own three boys are grown and out of the house. The neighborhood children give her plenty of special moments, like the time one girl left a message on her answering machine saying that she'd picked the last plum and that it was delicious. The girl paused for a moment, then concluded: "There must be something to this organic gardening."

"I just wanted them to have the experience of planting, watering and growing a garden," Harwell said. The victory garden from her own youth, she added, "was a wonderful memory."

Throughout the week, the children roam in and out of her yard unannounced. On the recent afternoon, after the seeds were planted, Doran Finley stood in the garage, eyeballing the tools, his favorite part of gardening. He pointed out a yellow shovel and green clodbuster. Then his face scrunched, and he looked up.

"Karen," he said seriously, "we're missing the other tool of these."

She sent him into the backyard to look for it.

"Okay," he said, "but I am staying away from the bees."

And with that, the organic gardener trotted off.