Before this fall, Samantha Swanick had eaten vegetables many times, but the 8-year-old had never thought she would actually grow one.
“After a few days, you can see them get bigger and bigger,” she said Friday at Centerville Elementary School in Beverly, where she and other third-graders carefully tend to three, raised-bed, organic vegetable gardens each week. “You have to put the tall stuff like tomatoes in the back and the small stuff in the front so all of them can have sun and grow. I…