Watch now: A book, a garden and the ELL students at Lincoln Northeast who found a space to belong

Tagwa Mohmed remembers harvesting ripe, red tomatoes as a child growing up in her native country of Sudan. Gardening there was just part of life, and her family planted everything under the sun.

“Any kind of vegetable,” she said, “we would plant.”

Seedfolks community garden 5.11 — Charlie Wortmann helps Tagwa Mohmed (center) and Pyoe Aye lift a wheelbarrow to fill a garden bed with dirt outside Lincoln Northeast High School.

KENNETH FERRIERA Journal Star

So Mohmed — with her green thumb and blue gardening gloves — naturally fit in with the other English language learners moving soil, shoveling mulch and planting marigolds and oregano in the garden boxes at Lincoln Northeast High School on Wednesday.

A garden by the students, for the students.

The idea came to Brooke David and her ELL students at Northeast last year after they had finished reading Paul Fleischmann’s book “Seedfolks.” The novella tells the story of a Vietnamese girl and a group of immigrants who turn a vacant city lot into a community garden. But not just any garden — a garden that represented each character, with crops from their home country.

The students at Northeast wanted to bring a similar project to their school.

“Each country knows about gardening,” said Mohmed, who moved to the U.S. in 2018.

So they got permission from Principal Keri Applebee and added partners along the way: Civic Nebraska, which runs the school’s Community Learning Center, the Kiwanis Club and Northeast’s Food, Energy, Water and Societal Systems focus program.