To help show young students how vegetables get from the field to the kitchen, Cornell University's Kids Growing Food program is now accepting grant applications from elementary and secondary schoolteachers in New York state and several middle Atlantic states. The grants will help teachers establish or maintain gardens on school grounds.

The application deadline is Dec. 3. Elementary or secondary schoolteachers from New York, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey or Pennsylvania who have not received a previous Kids Growing Food grant are eligible to apply. Grants of up to $500, plus gardening and educational materials, are awarded to successful applicants.

Over the past four years, about 45,000 students at 163 different schools have helped plant, tend and harvest Kids Growing Food gardens. From urban to suburban and rural schools, food is grown on school grounds, in window boxes, inside classrooms and even on school rooftops. This year, more than 30 schools in New York state participated, as well as eight schools in Maryland, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

Teachers use the gardens to teach an array of interdisciplinary subjects, from science to geography. "Kids get excited about growing their own food like farmers and then eating the fruits of their labor," says Daryle Foster, the Cornell University senior extension associate who created Kids Growing Food in 1998 as part of the Cornell Education Department's Agriculture in the Classroom program. "Studies show that young people will eat fruits and vegetables they grow themselves more readily than those they are told are good for them. So, not only does the school garden help kids make links to agriculture, but it may also help improve their well-being," Foster says.

High school and grade school students from Sherman Central School, Chautauqua County, N.Y., worked side-by-side earlier this year to grow a Native American-style "three sisters" garden consisting of corn, beans and squash or pumpkins. The older students tilled the garden and taught the young children how plants grow and produce. The teens also showed the children how to plan a food garden, start early spring seedlings in the greenhouse and plant, weed and water. Lessons learned include how the dry conditions experienced this past summer adversely affected the growth of some crops.

"The garden has been a positive experience all around," says Perry Dewey, a high school agriculture teacher at Sherman school. Mary Ann Rogers, a first-grade teacher at the school, says that when the older students see the younger ones in the school hallways, they greet them by name and become friends. "This is a big deal for a young child and a very positive and important outcome of our food garden partnership," she says.

The current Kids Growing Food program is funded by New York State Agriculture in the Classroom, the Mid-Atlantic Consortium and New York State Agriculture Tech Prep program. Initial support came from the New York state attorney general's office.

For more information or to obtain application materials, visit the web site http://cerp.cornell.edu/kgf , call (607) 255-9252 or send e-mail to: kidsgrowingfood@cornell.edu.