Hilltop summer children's garden makes junior gardeners masters

While a group of seven junior gardeners stood in a circle around a bucket of dirt, Greg Speichert held up a small tomato plant.

“Tomatoes are pretty sturdy,” he said to the group of 7- and 8-year-olds, “but don’t break them.”

After explaining how to take dirt from the bucket and plant the tomato stems, Speichert walked around the circle inspecting the children’s work.

“I think I did a pretty good job,” Rose Mary Nicholson, 7, said while smiling and holding up her plant.

Greg Speichert, director of the new Summer Junior Master Gardening Program at IU’s Hilltop Gardens, teaches the group from 9 a.m. to noon every Tuesday. Lessons include everything from the different smells of garlic plants to how to spread hay. A second group of 9- and 10-year-olds is taught on Thursdays at the same time, and 11- to 14-year-olds come out when they can to train the younger gardeners.

This is the first year the center has adopted the gardening program, which started at Texas A&M University. The program is taught through a book called “The Junior Master Gardener Handbook” that participants can take with them to any organization that teaches it, graduate student and Greg Speichert’s wife Sue Speichert said.

“If they move, they can do it anywhere in the country,” she said. “It takes a couple days to do a chapter. We begin with the book, but we want to get out there and garden with them.”

Sue Speichert said Greg Speichert discovered the program at an American Public Gardens Association conference in Texas a few years ago. She said the program got off the ground with help from Dr. Robert Sherwood, the associate dean for research at IU’s School of Education, and members of the Bloomington Garden Club, who donated money to buy the teachers’ manuals.

Hilltop Gardens began as a children’s garden around 60 years ago, Sue Speichert said, and is now almost entirely run by volunteers.

“With the state budget cuts, we’re down to just me,” Greg Speichert said. “We want people to learn. We can be better stewards of the planet when we learn how things work. And it’s not like you’re learning, because you came to look at the garden.”

While walking through the gardens, Greg Speichert pointed to a semi-enclosed gardening area. He explained that it is his goal to finish the building so the junior gardeners can continue learning through the winter.

“But we still need funding. Most of this won’t get planted,” he said, pointing to empty patches of land at the center. “There’s just not enough people.”

Greg Speichert said he has worked at Hilltop for nearly three years and has been gardening since he was 6 years old.

“My grandfather helped me,” he said. “He told me that sometimes plants just die — it’s no big deal.”

Sue Speichert said many of the children in the program have gardens at home and get to take plants with them to transfer into their own gardens.

Mason Smith, 8, said his dad helps him with his home garden.

“There was this one time we put a tomato plant in a dump truck,” he said. “And we left it in there for two weeks, and it lived. So we put it in our garden.”

Roxy Henry, 7, said she likes gardening because “some of the plants you can plant and eat, and some you can look at.”

Through the junior program, Greg Speichert said the children will begin to become successful gardeners and move on from there.

“We try to make it work on almost zero budget,” he said. “Hilltop is really Bloomington’s garden. I’m just here to facilitate it.”