Dedication

  To Emma

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1. Pickles and Cucumbers

  2. Yee-Haw and Ya-Hoo!

  3. I Can Dig It

  4. Nothing Grew

  5. Still Nothing Grew

  6. Guess What? Nothing Grew

  7. Where Do Seeds Come From?

  8. Magic Veggies

  9. We Actually Grew Something!

  10. Deer Are Weird

  11. Invisible Bunnies

  12. The Stakeout

  13. This Means War!

  14. Bladderwort!

  15. Attack of the Mutant Veggie

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author and Illustrator

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  My name is A.J. and I hate vegetables.

  Why do I hate veggies? Because they grow in the dirt, of course! I’m not gonna eat something that grows in dirt.

  And you know what dirt is, don’t you? It’s worm poop! That’s right. When worms go to the bathroom, it becomes dirt.*

  The point is, it was Monday morning in Miss Banks’s class.

  “Good morning, Miss Banks,” everybody said when she walked into the room.

  “Oh, I’m not Miss Banks,” she replied. “Miss Banks is out sick today. I’m her twin sister, Mrs. Banks.”

  What? I didn’t know Miss Banks had a twin sister.

  This was great news! If Miss Banks was out sick, her twin sister would be our sub. So we wouldn’t have math. We wouldn’t have social studies. We wouldn’t have reading. This was the greatest day of my life!

  “Just kidding,” said Miss Banks. “I don’t have a sister. Time is fun when you’re having flies!”

  She tricked us again! Miss Banks pulls lots of pranks.

  We pledged the allegiance and did Word of the Day. And you’ll never believe who walked into the door at that moment.

  Nobody! Why would you walk into a door? You could break your nose. But you’ll never believe who walked into the doorway.

  I’m not gonna tell you.

  Okay, okay, I’ll tell you. It was our principal, Mrs. Stoker.

  “Good morning, fourth graders,” she said. “Say, do you know what kind of vegetable you get when an elephant walks through your garden?”

  “No,” said Ryan, who will eat anything, even stuff that isn’t food.

  “Beats me,” said Michael, who never ties his shoes.

  “I give up,” said Andrea, this annoying girl with curly brown hair.

  “I give up too,” said Emily, Andrea’s crybaby friend who does everything Andrea does.

  “I have no clue,” said Neil, who we call the nude kid even though he wears clothes.

  “Me neither,” said Alexia, this girl who rides a skateboard all the time. “What kind of vegetable do you get when an elephant walks through your garden?”

  “Squash!” shouted Mrs. Stoker. “Get it?”

  “We get it,” everybody replied. Mrs. Stoker is a joker.

  “And do you know why the lettuce won the race?” she asked. “Because it was a head!”

  We all laughed. You should always laugh at the principal’s jokes, even when they’re not funny. That’s the first rule of being a kid.

  “But seriously,” said Mrs. Stoker. “I was in the cafeteria this morning, and I noticed that almost all the food we serve for lunch is full of preservatives and chemicals.”

  “Yum!” I said, until I realized that was a bad thing. “I mean yuck.”

  “So guess what we’re going to do,” said Mrs. Stoker.

  “Close down the vomitorium?” asked Neil.

  “No,” replied Mrs. Stoker.

  “Get healthier preservatives and chemicals?” asked Ryan.

  “No.”

  “Have pizza for lunch every day?” asked Alexia.

  “No,” said Mrs. Stoker. “We’re going to start our own vegetable garden!”

  What?!

  “That’s right,” continued Mrs. Stoker. “We’re going to plant seeds, water them, and harvest our own veggies in the field behind the school. And then we’re going to eat them. Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

  “Yes!” shouted all the girls.

  “No!” shouted all the boys.

  Oh, man! I thought we were going to use that space behind the school to make a pickleball court. Pickleball is cool.

  That’s when something occurred to me—pickles are veggies!

  “Hey, maybe we can plant pickles next to a pickleball court,” I suggested.

  “You can’t plant pickles, Arlo!” said Andrea, who calls me by my real name because she knows I don’t like it. “You plant cucumbers, and they turn into pickles.”

  Cucumbers turn into pickles? I didn’t know that. I thought pickles turned into cucumbers. But it doesn’t matter what turns into what. The point is, gardens are boring. And I’m not eating something that grows out of the dirt. Ugh, gross!

  “How about we grow candy in the garden?” I suggested.

  Little Miss Perfect rolled her eyes.

  “You can’t grow candy, dumbhead!” Andrea said. “You grow fruits and veggies, and stuff like cotton.”

  “Cotton?” I said. “If we can grow cotton, we can grow cotton candy!”

  The Human Homework Machine rolled her eyes again. Andrea is always rolling her eyes at me. I wish her eyes would roll right out of her head.

  Starting a garden is the worst idea in the history of the world.

  A few days went by. Nobody mentioned the vegetable garden. I thought Mrs. Stoker had forgotten about the idea. But then we were on the playground during recess when she and Miss Banks came over to us.

  “Follow me, kids,” Mrs. Stoker said, bringing us to the side of the school. “This is the spot where we’re going to plant our vegetable garden.”

  Ugh.

  Mrs. Stoker took a deep breath and threw out her arms. Well, she didn’t throw her arms away. She just put them out like a scarecrow.

  “This garden is going to be great,” she told us. “You’ll be out in the fresh air blah blah blah. We’ll work the land blah blah blah. We’ll grow our own food blah blah blah . . .”

  “It’s time for all of us to stop staring at screens,” said Miss Banks, “and get back to nature blah blah blah . . .”*

  They went on like that for a while.

  “I didn’t know you were a gardener, Mrs. Stoker,” said Andrea, who loves talking to grown-ups for no reason.

  “Oh, I don’t know anything about gardens,” Mrs. Stoker replied. “But I found somebody who is going to teach us how to start one.”

  At that moment, I heard a noise in the distance. It was a motor. The noise got louder. We turned around. And then I saw some weird-looking machine coming down the street toward the school. It was a tractor.

  “And here she comes now!” said Mrs. Stoker.

  The tractor drove across the playground and stopped on the grass next to us.

  “YEE-HAW!”

  A lady hopped off the tractor. She was wearing overalls, a straw hat, and a T-shirt that said TALK DIRT TO ME. A long piece of grass was hanging out of her mouth.

  “This is Miss Nichol,” said Mrs. Stoker. “Welcome to Ella Mentry School.”

  “YA-HOO!” said Miss Nichol. “It’s good to be here, y’all!”

  “Miss Nichol seems kind of young,” I said quietly.

  “Oh, she is young,” said Miss Banks. “But she’s outstanding in her field.”

  No she wasn’t. She was out standing in our field.

  Mrs. Stoker told us that Miss Nichol grew up on a farm, and that she recently graduated from college with a degree in organic farming.

  “You grow organs?” I asked. “Is that legal?”

  “Yee-haw!” yelled Miss Nichol. “That’s a knee-slapper!”

  She slapped her knee and laughed. Some grown-ups slap their knees when they laugh. Nobody knows why.

  Miss Nichol told us that she’s a graduate student, and she signed up to work with our school as a class project. She said she’s studying to get her master’s degree in botany. I guess that’s the science of bots.

  “Bots are cool,” I said. “I used to watch this show called Robot Wars. They would have a bunch of remote-controlled bots fighting each other to the death.”

  “Not those kinds of bots, dumbhead,” said Andrea, rolling her eyes. “Botany is the science of plants.”

  Andrea thinks she is sooooooo smart because she’s a member of the P.A.C. That’s the Principal Advisory Committee—a group of nerds who get to boss around the principal. I was going to say something mean to her, but I couldn’t think of anything good.

  “I just love growin’ stuff,” Miss Nichol told us. “I have a green thumb.”

  “You should see a doctor,” I said.

  “Think about it, y’all,” she continued. “Startin’ a garden is like teachin’ kids. Ya plant a seed and nourish it and watch it sprout and grow and blossom and mature and blah blah blah blah blah blah . . .”

  She went on and on, just like a real grown-up. What a snoozefest. I’d rather play pickleball.

  The next day, Miss Nichol arrived on her tractor again. This time, she was wearing a T-shirt that said GIVE PEAS A CHANCE on it. And this time, there was a man with her. You’ll never believe in a million hundred years who she got to help us work on the garden.

  I’m not gonna tell you.


/>   Okay, okay, I’ll tell you.

  It was Mr. Tony, who runs our after-school program! He’s a cool guy. One time he helped us try to get into Guinness World Records by making the biggest pizza in the world.*

  The first thing Miss Nichol and Mr. Tony did was take some long wooden boards and nail them together to make the borders of our garden. Then they gave each of us a shovel and told us to start digging. We had to loosen up the dirt before we could plant anything.

  “Y’all ready? Set? DIG!” shouted Miss Nichol.

  We all started digging.

  We dug. And we dug. And we dug.

  Hey, digging in the dirt with a shovel is hard work!

  “Isn’t this what they make prisoners do on a chain gang?” Michael asked as he stopped to wipe the sweat off his face.

  “Maybe we’ll find buried treasure under here,” said Alexia.

  “Yeah,” said Neil, “buried treasure from an ancient civilization.”

  “Maybe we’ll find a dead body,” I said.

  “That’s not appropriate, Arlo!” said Andrea. “This is a children’s book.”

  Ha! Andrea thinks she’s in a book. Can you believe that? What a dumbhead.

  We dug in the dirt for a million hundred hours. It was long, hard, boring work. We were all sweating. In the end, do you know what we found?

  Nothing. Just more dirt.

  “I reckon I’m gonna to pass out . . .” said Miss Nichol.

  “She’s gonna pass out!” shouted Ryan.

  “Give her some air!” shouted Alexia.

  “Call an ambulance!” shouted Michael.

  “I’m gonna pass out water and snacks,” said Miss Nichol.

  Oh.

  We sat in the shade eating apple slices. Miss Nichol explained that our next step would be to plant seeds in the garden to grow stuff. So if we want to grow corn, we would plant corn seeds. If we want to grow apples, we would plant apple seeds. And so on.

  Duh! Everybody knows that.

  “What kind of seeds are we going to plant?” asked Andrea.

  “That’s for you young ’uns to decide,” replied Miss Nichol. “It’s your garden. You should plant what you love to eat.”

  “I love hot dogs,” I said. “Can we plant hot dog seeds?”

  Andrea rolled her eyes.

  “You can’t plant hot dogs, dumbhead,” she said.

  “Oh, snap!” said Ryan.

  Why can’t a truck full of hot dogs fall on Andrea’s head? I was going to say something mean to her, but I didn’t have the chance because everybody started yelling out the stuff they wanted to plant.

  “I love doughnuts,” said Neil. “Hey, if we plant Cheerios, maybe they’ll grow up to be doughnuts.”

  Great idea. Neil should really be in the gifted and talented program.

  “If we plant straws,” said Alexia, “we can grow strawberries.”

  “Can we plant peppermints?” asked Emily. “Then we can grow candy canes.”

  “I’d like to plant jellybeans,” said Ryan. “They probably will grow into lollipops.”

  “I bet that if we planted eggs we’d grow eggplants,” said Michael. “That would make sense.”

  “And we could plant birdseed to grow birds,” said Neil.

  Everybody was coming up with good ideas for stuff to plant. Andrea just rolled her eyes.

  “We should plant chicken nuggets,” I suggested. “So we can grow chickens.”

  “You can’t grow chickens, Arlo!” said Andrea.

  I know that! Duh! I didn’t want to grow chickens. I wanted to grow a chicken tree. And then the chickens will grow on the tree. That just shows how much Andrea knows about gardening.

  “I love it, y’all!” said Miss Nichol. “We’ll start plantin’ tomorrow.”

  This was going to be the greatest garden in the history of gardens.

  The next day, we came in with everything we needed to start planting—Cheerios, straws, peppermints, jellybeans, eggs, birdseed, and chicken nuggets. Miss Nichol and Mr. Tony helped us scoop out the dirt, do the planting, cover the holes up with dirt, and sprinkle water on top to make it all grow.

  We knew it was going to take some time before anything grew in our garden. But still, we went out to there every day before school to see if anything had sprouted.

  A week went by. Nothing.

  Two weeks went by. Nothing! No doughnuts. No strawberries. No candy canes. No eggplants. No birds. No lollipops. No chicken tree. No nothing.

  It felt like we had waited a million hundred years for something to grow. I thought I was gonna die from old age. We were all getting discouraged.

  What did we do wrong? I guess you have to wait a long time if you want to have a garden. It felt like it was going to take four chapters for anything to grow.

  Nothing grew.*

  Nothing grew.*

  Nothing grew.* But you can tell your teacher that you finished reading three whole chapters in a few seconds. You must be a speed-reader!

  Nothing grew. Our garden was the worst garden in the history of gardens.

  The next day, Miss Nichol arrived on her tractor, wearing a T-shirt that said I’M ROOTING FOR YOU on it.

  Well, the tractor wasn’t wearing the T-shirt. Miss Nichol was. It would be weird for a tractor to wear a T-shirt, or any kind of clothing.

  Miss Nichol had a box with her. She was looking at our pathetic garden when Mrs. Stoker came out of the school.

  “I just wanted to see how you kids were making out,” she said.

  “Ugh, gross!” we all replied. “We’re not making out.”

  “Our garden is terrible,” admitted Andrea.

  “Gardening can be very difficult,” said Mrs. Stoker. “One time, I tried growing fungi, but it didn’t grow at all. I guess there was mushroom for improvement. Get it? Mushroom? Much room?”

  We all laughed even though Mrs. Stoker didn’t say anything funny.

  “Yeah,” she continued. “I know a guy who dug a deep hole in his garden and filled it with water. I think he meant well. Get it? But seriously, his whole garden flooded. It turned out there was a leek in it. Get it? There was a leek in the garden?”*

  She kept telling jokes for a while. We asked Miss Nichol why nothing grew in our garden. She told us she knew from the start that nothing was going to grow.

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” asked Neil.

  “I wanted to teach you young ’uns a lesson,” Miss Nichol explained. “Lollipops, candy canes, and doughnuts don’t grow outta the ground.”

  “What about chicken trees?” I asked.

  “Nope.”

  Bummer in the summer!

  Miss Nichol told us that if we wanted anything to grow in our garden, we would have to plant normal stuff like cucumbers, tomatoes, and zucchini. She opened the box she was carrying. It was filled with little bags of seeds. She got down on her knees with us and showed us how to plant the seeds.

  “Where do seeds come from, Miss Nichol?” asked Andrea, who has to know everything so she can be smarter than everybody else.

  “Seeds come from fruits and vegetables,” replied Miss Nichol.

  “So where do the fruits and vegetables come from?” Andrea asked.

  “They come from seeds,” said Miss Nichol.

  “And where do seeds come from?” asked Andrea.

  “They come from fruits and vegetables,” said Miss Nichol.

  “But where do fruits and vegetables come from?”

  They went back and forth like that for a while.

  We planted a bunch of seeds and watered them with a watering can. And then we waited.

  And waited.

  And waited.

  Nothing grew! This was frustrating! Maybe our dirt was no good. Maybe we didn’t water the seeds enough. Maybe we watered too much. Or maybe we were just terrible gardeners.

  That afternoon in class, we were talking about all this stuff. And you’ll never believe who walked into the door at that moment.

  Nobody! Who walks into doors? We went over that in Chapter 1. But you’ll never believe who walked into the doorway.

  It was Uncle Fred! He used to be the host of a kids’ TV show, but now he’s our music teacher. It’s a long story. You can read about it in a book called Uncle Fred Is a Knucklehead!

  “I heard about your garden,” Uncle Fred said. “I think I know what to do. Follow me.”