Valley students harvest fresh produce on Earth Day

PHOENIX (FOX 10) - On Monday, Earth Day is being celebrated worldwide and students at Garfield Elementary are honoring planet Earth within their own garden.

"I like going outside and learning about stuff I never really knew about and making stuff I didn't really know," Alexa Diaz said.

"You can bring awareness by exposing kids to food and it's great, but they actually grow it and harvest," said Paige Mollen, president of the Mollen Foundation. "They'll taste it more often and eat vegetables, so I think it's important for them to be engaged and know where their food comes from"

The students learn how to grow their own produce from the school's community garden, "Garfield's Garden on the Corner." They plant vegetables and herbs -- everything they need to cook a healthy recipe, with help from Fry's Food.

"Our food comes from someplace, goes to someplace, so we're showing the whole cycle, from seed to seed," said Chef O, head chef at Fry's Food stores. "So you grow it, you eat it, you compost it, you create it and the cycle starts again."

Learning more about what the Earth gives us and how we can give back to it, Garfield's Earth Day also teaches the students how they can work better together.

"We're more happy together because we're discussing things in a nice (sic) and we're not arguing about things and we're cooking as if we're having a family dinner," Yassir Perez said.

In the classroom or in the garden.