Early in the morning last Monday, a group of third graders huddled in the garden of Mendota Elementary School in Madison, Wisconsin. Of the dozen students present, a handful were busy filling up buckets of compost, others were readying soil beds for spring planting, while a number carefully watered freshly planted radishes and peas. The students were all busy with their assorted tasks until a gleeful shout rang across the space. Everything ground to a halt when a beaming boy triumphantly raised his gloved hand, displaying a gaggle of worms. The group of riveted eight- and nine-year-olds dropped everything to cluster around him and the writhing mass of invertebrates.

“They’re mending the soil one week, and then the next week they’re going to start to see these little seedlings pop through the soil, because they’re healthy and they’re happy and they have sunshine, and they’ve watered them,” said Erica Krug, farm-to-school director at Rooted, a Wisconsin nonprofit community agricultural organization that helps oversee the garden.