Smorgasbord of learning

“Mrs. Guest, I found a worm!” Samantha Roum cried out.

The Smith Elementary School student was working in teacher Jean Guest’s on-campus garden Tuesday when she made her surprise discovery.

Samantha and her classmates spend time nearly every day in the garden, sowing seeds, harvesting strawberries or watering.

The garden is a true family affair.

Guest’s parents, Harold and Eve Schmitz, are a fixture on campus — as they help fund the garden and work in it often.

Her mother also has another role at Smith.

“I started teaching about 13 years ago, and when I started, my mother started working with me,” Guest said.

At the back of her room sits a second teacher’s desk with a sign that reads, “This desk belongs to Grandma. The world’s greatest volunteer.”

Eve Schmitz helps her daughter out with everything from observing students’ needs to busy work.

Guest’s recently retired husband, Greg, whom the students call Gregor Bear, has spent his free time working in several locations on campus, adding wood chips in planters, turning plain areas into flower gardens, and adding a beautiful garden designed to attract butterflies to the area near the kindergarten classrooms and music room.

Guest’s cousin Leonard, who moved to California from Idaho, teaches the children about gardening as well; he spent time on a farm before working for John Deere.

Guest began her adventures in school gardening with a dirt patch along a classroom wall.

“It was an old garden that no one had used,” she said.

Her father and a gardener put topsoil in the plot, and Guest began cultivating it — until a mold problem at the school forced the gardening program’s end.

Guest had to wait several years during and after school building modernization efforts before her next chance to garden on campus.

One day, a school PTA president went to the local dog park and met a man, who still remains anonymous to Guest, who paid for an area in front of Guest’s classroom to be turned into a true garden, with raised, wheelchair-accessible beds and a watering system.

School Principal Mike Andrzejewski also won a gardening grant that allowed for the installation of a fence and an arbor of grape vines to be installed around the new garden.

“We water them every day,” student Gianna Acciacca, 8, said of the vines. “We also grow beautiful roses.”

Chloe Reiner, 8, was impressed by how quickly the class’ tomato plants grew.

“They’re really sprouting right now,” she said. “We use wire hoops to keep them up. There are red, purple and yellow tomatoes.”

And Smith teachers get to enjoy the garden’s bounty during the summer months, when tomatoes and cucumbers come into season.

Anything removed that is not eaten is put into compost bins; Guest’s second-graders help with worm composting, and also learn about butterflies.

“She’s one heck of a teacher,” Greg Guest said of his wife. “When the kids get her as a new teacher, the parents say they’ve won the lottery.”

Reporter CANDICE BAKER can be reached at (714) 966-4631 or at [email protected].