Rebecca Lockman and her father David Lockman created Gardening Roots to Our World (GROW). The new Solon High School (SHS) club is focused on bringing the community together by helping each other learn about food production. Rebecca introduced GROW at the SHS Club Fair this year. The Club hopes to have meetings to expand their group into the community and hopes their idea can grow into a large community garden.

“There are short term and long term goals right know, we just want to get the plot of land from the city and get the garden running,” said SHS science teacher and club advisor Crystal Cadorini.

Rebecca and her team have many ideas regarding how they can reach their goals. First, a diverse group of gardeners. They want all ages, genders and ethnicities to participate.

The club also hopes to add different aspects from the education classes offered in schools. The club ultimately wants to take part in all possible educational aspects, they hope to partner up with math, science and electives to build off one another, Math classes can create the dimensions of the garden and measure how far away the plants should be planted from each other. Science classes can talk about  and explore hands on how and why the plants grow. The class that could incorporate the garden the most is Foods because they can use the produced goods for their food they make in class.

“I’m a science teacher so it would be easy to deal with biology or even environmental science-, we could connect it to the club,” Cadorini said.

The club wants to join the education and student aspect to the senior citizens’ activities.

The Club Recognizes that different age groups bring different knowledge to their club. They hope that the senior citizens can join the students and create a bridge in the community. They also hope that the garden can create new activities in the community.

“If it’s incorporated into all the schools then all the little kids will be working with older kids and other people in the community so the garden is intergenerational,” Rebecca Lockman said.

GROW will not just garden though, they plan to have meetings to share ideas on gardening as a whole.

“For some of the group meetings I thought we could have speakers, like nutritionist, who could come in and talk about healthy foods and how to keep the right nutrients in your body,” Rebecca Lockman said. “Or even a local farmer, who works in agriculture could come in and give helpful tips.”

While there are still some kinks to work out, Rebecca Lockman has been working on making her garden a reality for years now, and won’t stop until she make her plan a reality.

The club idea is based of a promise Rebecca made at her bat mitzvah to help the less fortunate and help the community around her.  

“Rebecca made a promise at her Bat Mitzvah that I never let her forget, because what she wanted to do, I thought was just that important,” David Lockman said. “I think at this point she doesn’t want to let it go. No matter what you have I think you need to have a fireball to spearhead the project so you don’t get lost along the way.”