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John Hume stood before a lush fountain of green Thursday afternoon in the otherwise barren strip of gravel behind the Takoma Park Co-op, gently handling budding tomatoes and inspecting the broad, deep-green leaves of a crop of zucchini plants in a tiny urban garden he made with local students in April.

Each Thursday afternoon, anywhere from two to 10 Montgomery Blair High School and Montgomery College students converge on the African-style "keyhole garden" to water their vegetables, add to the central compost bin and do any weeding that needs to be done. While the garden cost virtually nothing to build, the seeds and other minor expenses were paid for by the Main Street initiative of the nonprofit Old Takoma Business Association.

Using discarded concrete debris from a construction site across nearby Carroll Avenue, the students built the upraised plot and then filled it with layers of ash, horse manure and leaf compost pitched in by the city. Hume, a Main Street Takoma volunteer, instructed the students on the basics of the gardens, which are designed with a niche in one wall where a gardener can stand and easily reach each plant.

The plots are widely used in the mountainous African nation of Lesotho, were the terrain does not allow much space for farming, Hume said.

"We're showing people how to be more food-independent," Hume said. "A garden this size is designed to supply a small family … it's low-impact, square-inch gardening. Cost to build? Zero."

The garden idea took root when Laura Rothlisberger, an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer who coordinates community-service activities between the college and high school, brought a group of students to one of the Main Street group's clean-up events in April. That's when they met Hume and planned future community-service projects.

"Right away John knew of this sort of garden," said Rothlisberger, who added that at first she was dubious of the value of the deceptively compact garden. "I didn't know if it was really going to work. I was a skeptic."

Rothlisberger has since dismissed her doubts, scanning the group of four students who made it down to the garden Thursday, proudly showing off the fruits of the seeds they helped to plant.

"Sometimes I'll come by to check on [the garden], and one of the students will be out here," she said. "Another time it was pouring down rain, and 10 students still came out to weed."

Aside from teaching the students and any interested community members the benefits of the miniature plots, Rothlisberger will also be allotting student service learning hours to the high school students. The group has already delivered a batch of zucchini bread to a local homeless shelter.

Lea Vanessa Kemda, 16, a freshman at Blair, said she was proud of her gardening efforts and felt a sense of partial ownership over the small plot she attended diligently over the summer.

"Now I know how to make my own garden like this," she said. "Because I was taking summer school, I missed [coming to the garden] for one month, and it grew so much while I was gone."

Thulani Tlokotsane, 21, who is studying business at Montgomery College, is originally from Lesotho, where he said his grandparents have several keyhole gardens on their land in the mountains. Once he heard about a similar plot near campus, he immediately got involved.

"The people who created this type of garden, they didn't have arable land," he said of his home country. "They lived in a mountainous country, so they created a plan B that is very efficient."