If you were to peek around the back of Bayless Elementary School, you’d find the Bayless Community Garden: an array of garden beds, bursting with strawberries, shallots, cherry tomatoes and beyond. Since 2016, the garden has been carefully tended by Bayless’ Garden Club, who weed, water and raise awareness for their little haven of produce and greenery. 

Now, Bayless High School has received a $3,500 garden grant from the Whole Kids Foundation, a nonprofit focused on children’s nutrition. Garden Club sponsor Jess O’Brien hopes to use the grant money for a second wheelchair-accessible garden bed, an increase to garden infrastructure and added signage that honors the cultural backgrounds of Bayless students — and the school’s young gardeners.

“Encouraging students to have a love for nature and take care of our environment, our planet, is really important,” O’Brien said.

O’Brien estimates that 25 students are involved in Garden Club, which meets twice a week after school. She says it’s grown from the year before, which was her first year as club sponsor. While the majority of the club’s members are high schoolers, some students from the middle school have joined.

The Garden Club’s work goes beyond watering and weeding the crops: O’Brien says students tailor their interests to help the club.

Tech-savvy or design-oriented students create flyers, while those with a heart for kids might work with elementary classrooms to plant produce. Last year, the club worked with a first-grade special education class to plant a bed of pumpkins. 

“That was awesome,” O’Brien said. “And the pumpkins are growing amazingly.”

The club works hard maintaining the garden, but this work does not go unrewarded; once ripe, members are free to try their club-grown produce.

“They really enjoy eating the vegetables right from the garden,” O’Brien said. “It’s really cool to see them so excited about that, when there’s stuff that they can actually pick.”

O’Brien is passionate about making the Bayless Community Garden accessible to all students. Last year, using a $500 grant, the school purchased its first wheelchair-accessible bed, which is raised higher from the ground. Not only does it help students in wheelchairs reach the soil, but students who have trouble bending down can also benefit. 

The space also includes a sensory garden bed, which is dedicated to plants that offer sensory experiences, like the rattlesnake plant, citronella, lemon balm and others.

With the grant, O’Brien hopes to expand the Bayless Community Garden into an even more inviting space. She emphasized the array of cultural backgrounds represented by students in the Bayless School District and the Garden Club, inspiring her desire to put up signage to label the different plants from various cultures and their origins. 

Also in her dreams for the future, O’Brien wants to collaborate with the cafeteria for a taste-testing of foods that represent the backgrounds of Bayless students, using produce from the garden.

“We thought it would be a great opportunity to combine forces to uplift all the amazing cultures that make up our district,” O’Brien said. “We’re really fortunate to have so many people from so many different areas.”