A Chula Vista High School teacher is repeating history to teach her students about patriotism during some of America’s most crucial battles.
Throughout WWI and WWII, the federal government asked civilians to grow their own gardens and share any excess crops with the government to help feed American troops overseas.
To understand how Victory Gardens rallied the country in time of war, Diana Kulhanek, department chair for the history department at Chula Vista High School, is having her history students plant one on campus in a small area facing K Street.
Chula Vista High School is currently beautifying its campus. One way it’s doing this is several students are using open areas on campus to plant different flowers and vegetables. Kulhanek realized how interested students were in creating agriculture for the school and decided to incorporate gardening into a nutritional and history lesson.
“As I looked at the kids doing it (planting flowers and vegetables), I thought, what could the history department do? And I just realized, hey let’s plant a Victory Garden and make it a modern version so we could include the history of Victory Gardens and sort of modernize it to encourage kids to plant their own, even though it’s not a time of war they could still learn about sustainability and learning to grow their own organic fruits and vegetables to make healthy choices,” Kulhanek said.
The project is in the planning stages.
In preparation for the Victory Garden, students like tenth- grader Rafael Escamilla are learning different agricultural skills.
“I didn’t even realize I like gardening,” he said. “At first I just wanted to earn community service (hours), then I got hooked,” he said
Currently students are pulling weeds to create space for the installation of a garden bed. The Chula Vista Garden Club on March 21 will assist in putting in a temporary garden bed, Kulhanek said. This will mark the area and let students know it is a future site of the Victory Garden.
Kulhanek said the garden will be American themed.
“We’re going to keep a patriotic theme to our garden and so we’re going to emphasize flowers, vegetables and herbs and get as many red, white and blue colorings as we can in this particular garden,” she said. “We are going to use tomatoes, radishes, onions. We are going to have some flowering red and white bougainvillea.”
Kulhanek said the Victory Garden will also include a red poppy because the garden will be dedicated to the troops of the past and present.
“A red poppy symbolizes the blood that was shed by our soldiers fighting in our wars,” she said.
Kulhanek said the Victory Garden will be used by both staff and students. She said the project will have a cross-curricular component so students outside the history department can also benefit educationally.
Lesson plans in both the world and U.S. history classes will be connected to it; geography students will include the garden lessons in their agriculture and land use unit; biology can use the garden to teach about Mendel and plant genetics; stage tech students will measure, build the raise garden beds; and art students will volunteer to recreate the government propaganda posters as a mural on the wall.
Kulhanek also said Southwestern College’s School of Landscape Design and Horticulture will volunteer to help with the project. Kulhanek said this will be an opportunity for Chula Vista High School students to think about school-to-college-to career.
The garden will be built solely on donations, Kulhanek said.
