At Lyman C. Hunt Middle School in Burlington’s New North End, a large garden plot beside the sports fields yields cute cucamelons for students to marvel over, peas for teachers’ genetics lessons, basil for the cafeteria, and perennials for the community — human and pollinator — to enjoy. Sixth graders planted almost all of it under the guidance of their science and math teacher, Maisie Anrod.
Anrod, 28, who’s entering her fourth year at Hunt, teaches an elective gardening class that will harvest greens for food service staff, plant garlic and put the garden to bed this fall.
“I don’t want this to be just ‘Miss Maisie’s garden.’ I want it to be our community’s garden.”
Maisie Anrod
But the garden isn’t just for Hunt students: A local daycare group, a service-learning class from the University of Vermont and community members have all gotten their hands dirty. At twice-weekly volunteer garden hours, neighbors and families water, weed and harvest. They all go home with vegetables.
“I don’t want this to be just ‘Miss Maisie’s garden.’ I want it to be our community’s garden,” Anrod said. With a renewed, intergenerational energy that goes beyond the school, “I think it’s growing into that,” she added.
In 2003, Vermont FEED and the City of Burlington teamed up to build school gardens as part of a push for local foods. Hunt’s expansive garden was founded in 2009 as the biggest of the city’s school gardens, according to the Burlington School Food Project, and that organization’s staff members Sarah Heusner and Jen Trapani long maintained it.
The garden was a big part of the school’s culture, Anrod said, until activity waned during the pandemic. A former farm-to-school coordinator and Shelburne Farms education fellow, she expressed interest in reviving it when she interviewed for the teaching job.
Compared with the classroom, where she faced a steep learning curve as a first-time teacher, the garden “felt like a place I could contribute, where I had my feet under me,” Anrod said. “I knew how to plant a cucumber plant, weed, water and harvest.”
Students tend to feel grounded in the garden, too, she said. Anrod takes her science class out there for nature observations, and other teachers bring students to read among its rows. They can move their bodies, smell, taste and notice things — hands-on learning that often sinks in “deeper than something that’s just on a worksheet,” Anrod said. Some students who struggle in the classroom blossom in the garden, becoming experts and leaders.
On a Monday morning in mid-August, a few days before Hunt’s teachers returned to the building to prepare for the school year, Anrod strolled through the garden’s unfenced rows, checking on Genovese basil seedlings and rainbow chard that had been chomped by deer. She brushed soil over potatoes, hoping the harvest could wait until students are back on August 27.
“Stay buried, friends,” she encouraged.
After the first couple weeks of school, Anrod and her teaching partner will bring their new-to-middle-school classes out to harvest bouquets of sunflowers, cosmos, zinnias and dahlias. As a gesture of gratitude, each student will give their bouquet to someone in the school who’s helped them find their way.
Jonesy, a soon-to-be eighth grader, is a regular in Hunt’s garden. He started working in the garden in sixth grade and continues to volunteer after school and on weekends. This spring’s pea crop — planted on Pi Day in March — was all him, and he enjoys watering and harvesting. Tomato hornworms, not so much. He biked to the garden on that late-summer Monday, promptly picked a large, light-green bell pepper and crunched right in.
“It’s just peaceful,” Jonesy said of the garden.
Later, when Hunt principal Melanee Alexander stopped by, Jonesy handed her one of the peppers. She, too, took a crunchy bite.
“I have a half gallon of pickles to bring to the first staff meeting,” Anrod told Alexander. The cucumbers — one of Anrod’s favorite crops — have been very productive this year.
She planned to bring something a bit sweeter to that evening’s volunteer hours: chocolate-peanut butter cookies. Anrod loves to bake and teases her treats in her weekly newsletter, which features a list of what’s ready to harvest, tasks to complete and a good garden pun.
The newsletter goes out to the whole school and anyone in the broader community who signs up. Lynette Reep, who lives on nearby Cayuga Court, joined the mailing list last summer. She was interested in the perennial patch that sits next to the garden for her close-up photos of native pollinators. Now, she visits regularly to photograph while her partner gathers some of the harvest for the food pantry.
“Maisie has become a nexus for all these community happenings,” Reep said. “It’s nice for us to feel connected to something that’s so close to home.”
As the intergenerational volunteer group chatted near the garden’s edge, a dragonfly softly landed on Anrod’s hand. It stayed for more than a minute, clearly enjoying the community, too.
Sign up for the Hunt Middle School garden mailing list at tinyurl.com/huntmiddleschoolgarden.
The original print version of this article was headlined “Garden Lessons | Plants and community grow at Lyman C. Hunt Middle School in Burlington”
This article appears in Aug 27 – Sep 2 2025.
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