Harborside Academy juniors Corey Mosley, right, and Vincent Shumway build up the sides of compost beds with chicken wire at the school\'s gardens on the Xten Industries property in the Business Park of Kenosha. ( KEVIN POIRIER )		Harborside Academy juniors Corey Mosley, left, and Shannon O\'Malley plant tomatoes in raised beds at the school\'s gardens. ( KENOSHA NEWS PHOTO BY KEVIN POIRIER )

LaQueisha Varnado was doubtful when her teacher tried to plant the idea of gardening as a school science project. “The garden was going to be in the middle of a field with a bunch of weeds,” recalled the 17-year-old junior at Harborside Academy. “I thought it wasn’t going to work.”

But now, after seeing that field yield spinach and other crops this spring, she’s feeling encouragement and said horticulture might become a part of her life. “I planted tomatoes Wednesday for the first time in my life,” she said. “I don’t think I’d have ever worked in a garden if I had not come out here.”

Varnado is one of the school’s 106 juniors taking part in the project, suggested by teacher Mary Bohning during discussions last year about environmental science and how Harborside might become a “green” school. Bohning said project goals include building relationships between young people and nature.

“We’ve become disconnected from our food,” she said. “We truck food in, and this is an attempt to feed people locally, for our students to reconnect with the land.”

Alan Beaulieu, Harborside Academy instructional guide, said the class built 10 raised garden beds of 50 square feet each by the beginning of May on land offered by Xten Industries in the Kenosha Business Park. Gateway Technical College is providing plant starts and six horticulture program mentors. Students planted romaine lettuce, spinach and other cold-weather crops, which are now ready for harvest. On Wednesday, the group built three more beds, built compost bins and planted tomatoes, peppers and eggplants.

Beaulieu said the garden’s bounty is to be sold at the Kenosha HarborMarket, and some of it will be donated to Women and Children’s Horizons and the Shalom Center. Bohning said a Kenosha Unified School District food service official is considering using the garden’s produce in student lunches to help promote good nutrition.

Fighting childhood obesity is part of the Healthy People Kenosha County 2020 initiative’s work on youth issues, said Diana Andrekus, Kenosha County Health Division public health specialist. That’s why the initiative is supporting the gardening project and hoping it will lead to a garden at every school, she said.

“We’d use the project as an example to sell the idea to the rest of the schools and the district administration,” Andrekus said.

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