MIDDLEBORO — Growth doesn’t only happen in the classroom at Goode Elementary School.

It also happens outside on Wednesday afternoons, when the school’s garden club meets to learn the fundamentals of the craft and to help make the school look nicer.

This is the after-school club’s first year at work, and first-grade teacher Ashely Ferrini, the supervisor of the club, says it has been a big hit.

Group members range from kindergarten to fifth grade.

“I really enjoy gardening and getting ideas for my own garden,” said Olivia Quinn, the club’s only fifth grader. “And I think I’m good with little kids and I like helping them out.”

Maverick Penn, the club’s only kindergartner, spent most of his time collecting snails from the dirt and caring for a worm.

“I came to school just for the worms and snails,” Penn explained, holding a worm in his hand.

On Wednesday, March 29, local landscaping company All Cleaned Up stopped by the school to lay fresh mulch for the budding gardeners to spread around the front of the school.

All Cleaned Up connected with Ferrini through the Facebook group “Middleboro Helping Middleboro.”

The landscapers, led by owner Eric Olson, previously brought over cobblestones for the students to lay around the flagpole in front of the school.

Once he saw their enthusiasm, he felt he had to return.

“We were only going to donate the cobblestones, but I wanted to do more after meeting the kids,” said Olson, who attended Goode as a child.

The landscapers shoveled mulch from a truck into wheelbarrows, which they poured onto a flower bed in front of the school while the students helped spread it around evenly.

The kids wore gardening gloves, but after some hard work, a few brave souls took the gloves off and attacked the piles of mulch with bare hands.

“The kids are having fun, and that’s all that matters,” Olson said.