As the heartwarming Pixar film Up reminds us, 'Adventure is out there!', and thanks to new Garden Coordinator Tobi Buchman, it’s coming to the students of Oak Grove Elementary School.
Tobi’s path to Oak Grove School has been anything but conventional. From sailing the Pacific Ocean as a ship's cook to studying lemurs in Madagascar, their life has been filled with wild, wonderful adventures. Now, as Oak Grove School’s new Garden Coordinator, they’re bringing that same sense of curiosity, joy, and spontaneity to the soil.
Tobi looking at newly sprouted plants in the Oak Grove raised beds.
“When I was a kid, I wanted to work with animals.” That desire stuck all the way through college and came up in an unexpected conversation with the university president that led to a surprising opportunity. “He asked me what I wanted to do, and I said I wanted to work with lemurs, maybe in a zoo or in the wild. And he just casually goes, ‘Oh, like my friend Jack Hanna?’” Tobi recalls. “I literally chased him down after class and was like, ‘Wait, do you actually know Jack Hanna?’” A few emails later, Tobi was invited to the Columbus Zoo to meet a childhood hero.
Post-graduation, their childhood dream became reality when they did fieldwork studying lemurs in Madagascar, tagged fish in the Florida Keys, and spent years aboard educational tall ships: floating classrooms where college students learned about science, navigation, and life at sea.
Today, Tobi is planting more literal roots here in Vermont.
“This is the first time I’ve really felt like I want to get settled somewhere. The garden here is the perfect place to do that. It’s hands-on, creative, and the kids kind of run the show. I love it.”
Tobi sees the garden not just as a space for growing vegetables, but as a living laboratory and playground. Whether it’s cooking spinach with students for taste tests, experimenting with dehydrators to create plant-based pigments for art projects, or planting on the fly with kids racing the clock, every day in the garden is filled with learning and laughter.
One of Tobi’s favorite parts of the garden right now is the Mystery Bulb Bed, an unknown mix of transplanted bulbs inherited from last year’s garden. Instead of tossing them out, Tobi gave them a new home and a name.
“I just started calling it the Mystery Bulb Bed because I had no idea what was going to come up. It could be garlic, onions, flowers, who knows? I think it’s hilarious, and the kids love the surprise. It’s the perfect metaphor for this job: we plant, we wait, and we see what grows.”
Tobi and the “Mystery Bulb Bed”.
From mung beans to mystery bulbs, adorable zucchini leaves to sunflowers that sprouted indoors but not out, the garden under Tobi’s care is a place of delight, discovery, and a little bit of chaos, just the way they like it.
Tobi put it best: “When I was a kid, I just didn’t hear that it was okay to try things and see what would happen, without worrying about messing up. Maybe it wasn’t missing, maybe I just didn’t hear it. But I was always so focused on making sure nothing went wrong. Now, with this job, it’s kind of like my mission to get messy.”
Even though the school year may be drawing to a close, Tobi is excited to deepen the garden’s role in the Oak Grove community. With activities inspired by Harvest of the Month programming they look forward to bringing more science, cooking, and art to students, along with a healthy dose of fun. Whether they’re leading a lesson on plant identification, cooking up scrambled eggs with fresh spinach, or letting kids vote on the cutest leaf, Tobi’s approach is rooted in joy, curiosity, and letting things grow wild.
Written by Elyse Morckel