Harvesting our First Gold in the School Garden! Our Sweet Potatoes! 🍠

It was one afternoon before the school year ended that I was intrigued by the buzz and laughter outside my classroom! It was a joyful noise, and so I wonder what made my Grade 12 extremely happy on this hot afternoon. My guess was they got a perfect on their exam in the other subjects, or perhaps they had passed the scholarship they applied for. Curious as a cat, I went outside to find out what the happy buzz was all about, and I was surprised to see what they were busy with! They were harvesting our sweet potato crops!

One of my Grade 12 students discovered that our sweet potatoes had grown big root crops already, and so he excitedly called his classmates for harvest! Oh my! They were like kids excitedly hunting for eggs on easter day!

Guess what, every root crop they unearthed, one shouts and brags his/her discovery of the root crop to one another! haha! It was as if they struck some gold in our garden!

Originally, now is not the perfect time to harvest our sweet potatoes. We still have two weeks to wait for the right harvest that will surely yield larger crops. But when we counted the days, we learned that that time would fall after their graduation. So we decided to harvest it earlier before their graduation, so everyone can eat it and enjoy it.

Funny thing is, we only have more or less 10 stems of sweet potatoes. Thinking of this, the harvest would not suffice the hungry stomachs of my Grade 12. But I am a firm believer in "however small a thing is, if one is willing to share it with others, then that small thing can stretch like magic and be enough to share with everybody. But somehow, I am crossing my fingers for a bounty harvest not for me but for my students.

So, back to the commotion. This harvest was not planned at all, as nobody in the class had brought a bolo or any garden tools. So instead, they used sticks and even their bare hands to dig up the crop. Each of them was positioned to a plant or stem they were to dig, and then they competed and boasted who could get the biggest harvest! I laughed upon watching them. It was such a heartwarming sight!

It touches my heart remembering the day 1 of preparing our garden. How their hands got dirty, how their faces dripped with sweat, and how they tended our garden every day was still vivid in my mind. Now, all the hard work of my students has been paid off by the harvest we have! I know this harvest is small, but I could see how grateful and happy they are to reap the fruits of their labor.

The following day, we cooked the sweet potatoes as one of the key ingredients of our Binignit (a famous Filipino soup traditionally prepared during the Holy week). Since the sweet potato wasn't enough to go around, I assigned some students to bring other ingredients for our Binignit. And yes, the day came, everybody savored the hot soup we had (probably the last soup we will share since they will already graduate next week). What a bittersweet moment.

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Our yummy Binignit!

This year's garden is proof of our Filipino saying "Pag may itinanim, may aanihin which means "You reap what you sow" in English. But beyond that, this serves as a beautiful reminder and a lasting memoir as well, that when students help each other grow something, in the end, everyone can benefit, no matter how small it is. And lastly, it's a reminder that bonding is not only created inside the classroom but also outside, like nurturing our garden.🤗