Opposite page: Patrick and Connie Lahr look in on a square foot garden at their home in Maple Lake, Minn. From above left to bottom right: 1)Pat and Connie at the senior center next door to their home where they have helped some residents with their gardening projects. 2) Connie explains the growing process to some of Ms. Hagen’s first graders. 3) Connie and Pat prepare sandwiches and fresh veggies for the class after their outdoor tutorial. 4) A carrot fresh picked from the garden. 5) Ann Hagen unearths
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the most helpful and exuberant future gardeners. “The kids love it,” the teacher Ann Hagen, 25, says. “They’re always excited and interested. As you can see, they get over-excited.” The Lahrs, known as Mrs. Ladybug and Mr. Earthworm to the children, have influenced a generation of Maple Lake students. Crossing the street from their home once a week during the growing season, they show the first graders how to plant, care for and raise garden vegetables. They teach a simple system of gardening called square-foot F our F eet gardening and the goal is a The square foot gardening sysmodest one. tem, invented by author Mel BarHelp children tholomew, endorses gardening reestablish a above ground in 4’ x 4’ boxes, each divided into 16, 1 square-foot secconnection to tions. Instead of planting long rows, their elders, to each section gets planted indithe earth and vidually. This way, you can get many to the cycle of varieties of delicious vegetables life. But that’s maturing at different times instead just here at the of too much of one thing all at once. elementary More on the method can be found at school. What www.squarefootgardening.com. they really want is to improve the world’s nutrition, thereby improving the world. The way they see it, there really isn’t much humans do that can’t be improved with better eating from organically grown vegetables. Have plans, will trowel
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o see this notion cast in strong relief, picture the Lahrs in Haiti, 1985. They’re not visiting, they live there. Pat fixes television sets for the wealthy and the mission groups in Port-au-Prince. The rest of their time they teach anyone who will listen the benefits of
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the fresh carrot in front of her students. 6) “We’ve got french fries growing here,” Connie says, “so what is it?” The students reply in semiunison “Potatoes!” 7) Ms. Hagen tries the first radish of the season - spicy! 8) The Lahrs tend lettuce at an indoor growing table in the school.
square foot gardening. “It got to the point where anyone who came into the apartment to get their TV fixed walked out with a garden,” Connie says. “We basically forced it on everyone.” What they so enthusiastically offered to the Haitians was the chance to take their health into their own hands. Vegetables are very hard to come by for poor city dwellers. And even in the country the soil is poor and rocky. By teaching the fundamentals of composting and square foot planting, they soon had dozens of families making their own produce and adding calories, vitamins and minerals to their diets. The Lahrs did not go to Haiti with a mission group. They were really just on their own. That’s because they had their own ideas for how to help. “When a mission or a team goes to Haiti, they’re always looking to see what they can do,” Connie says. “But to put a garden project in place is a lot harder. You have to make May/June 2009
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