It starts with education and ends with community service
By Jennifer Eisenbart
Staff Writer
If you happen to walk into the courtyard at Burlington High School, you’ll see a new addition that might leave you with a healthy appetite.
That’s because a lush garden of vegetables has replaced much of the former lawn in what used to be a little-used courtyard.
Completed in May, the student-led school garden has blossomed over the summer into corn, herbs, and tasty snap peas that students nabbed off the vines to sample Monday night while promoting the achievement.
That kind of tasting is exactly what former Burlington FFA director Jodi Rogahn – who is overseeing the last of the project before starting a new job in Cedarburg this school year – loves to see.
“It’s just been a pretty amazing project,” Rogahn said. “It’s been many years that I’ve had a vision of what this garden would look like.
“We finally had the resources and the great students to get it done.”
Rogahn now hands the project off to the students and new FFA advisor Katie Hagemann. But, judging by the work that’s been done, it’s in good hands.
Already, food from the garden has been donated to Love Inc. The various vegetable beds sport beans, cabbage, corn, tomatoes, squash, zucchini, peppers, pumpkins, carrots, lettuce and even strawberries, as well as an herb garden.
“Our goal was to provide fresh fruit and veggies for our community,” Rogahn said.
In February of this year, BHS’s Nolan Rueter – now a senior – applied through the FFA for a “Food for All” grant. It was the culmination of years worth of committee meetings and teacher, student and community support.
With BHS students from the school’s “Green Team” – advised by teacher Joel Graham – and the FFA, the funding process finally came to fruition with a $2,500 grant.
While the cost of the garden went slightly over that amount, the rest was donated by the FFA and students from various programs within the high school got started on the construction process.
Technical Education teacher Casey Miller’s Career Construction Academy classes built the gardens, and also the watering system for it. Julianne Krusemark was involved with Rogahn’s landscaping classes, which helped design the whole plot – beds, excavating and what to plant.
“It was pretty amazing, going from the beginning stages, where it was just ideas, to where it is now,” Krusemark said. “Real life.”
Now plans will move forward with the next stages. Already there are hopes of creating hanging baskets of plants on the pergola inside the garden, and the two long beds at either end of the garden are being set up to have “hoop houses” – in essence, miniature greenhouses.
The goal is to grow food year round.
A grand opening party for the garden for community members to come and see the project is in the works.
For right now, though, the students are enjoying the final product as much as the teachers.
“I think it’s great,” Rueter said.
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