Garden Tour: May 2013

Posted on May 28, 2013 by kidsingardens

Time to wander around the school garden. Join me.

Let’s start with the roses.

When the breeze is blowing, and you get a waft of honeysuckle flowers, it’s a little bit of heaven.

Another 3×3 square foot gardening model, with the pvc criss-cross hoop. Planted with kale, swiss chard, peppers and marigolds.

Gazebo windowboxes planted with flowers purchased at the Warners Springs Mother’s Day plant sale as well as plants I scored for free at the end of Master Gardener Spring Seminar.

Also new to the gazebo, an inhabited bird nest in the rafters!

Peas, glorious peas.

GARDEN FAIL. We planted this out with three varieties of spinach, which barely sprouted then turned yellow, despite babying. Keepin’ it humble, in the garden.

Sidewalk art adjacent to the garden.

We took our artist-made solar fountain inside for the winter so that it wouldn’t crack in the low temperatures. It’s now back home, though in a different location—closer to the habitat bed.

Looks like we may have our first crop of grapes when school resumes.

Kat Beck introducing the preview films in order to introduce the Wild and Scenic Film Festival at an all-school assembly. After watching “Watermelon Magic,” we’ve witnessed students standing over plants and whispering, “grow, grow, grow!”

Lastly, giving Backcountry Collaborative partner awards, I got to gush about my Garden Beneficials and University of Wednesday parent helpers. I made the point: not only do they do A LOT of work in the garden, but they also love the garden with me. I am grateful for both.

Garden Tour, April 2013

Posted on April 9, 2013 by kidsingardens

Join me as we take our periodic stroll around the garden!

Junior High students often change the message on the blackboard hung in their garden. Yes, welcome indeed!

I might have mentioned we are planting a lot of peas to get ready for our first Harvest of the Month program in May. (Pinecones are to discourage critters from walking in the bed.)

As we were harvesting the broccoli, one child told me she didn’t know that the part of broccoli we eat is curled up flowers. I told her we’d leave one plant in the ground to flower so she could see for herself.

Broccoli is also coming up in one of our container gardens. That’s one of the funny things about school gardens—mystery plants! (Someone, at some time, had an idea, a vision, a spare plant…who knows?)

The strawberry plants look luscious. Keep. meaning. to. enclose. them. in. nets.

The tulips are finally up in the breast cancer awareness ribbon. Watching them bloom took on new meaning for me this year as two very brave and beautiful friends of mine have kicked cancer’s butt in the last year.

New child-created signage on the bulletin board on the CATCH nutrition concept: go, slow and whoa foods.

We’ve been moving native strawberries out of this prime veggie growing location to the hillside around the fruit trees, as a move toward a permaculture fruit tree guild. We hadn’t moved all of them by Science Day though so I split the bed to make some room for pea planting, pinning back the strawberries with some white picket fencing we keep moving around the garden. Cute!

Someone donated this flag last year, and we fly it—announcing our allegiance to daffodils!

Mrs. Shull’s fourth grade class peas. Each child did a letter on an index card, I laminated them and kids taped them to bamboo skewers.

We have a gazillion wildflower seeds in the garden, from seed ball making activities, former projects, etc. Wildflowers have a special immunity in our garden. Wherever they want to pop up, we gladly let them stay.

This little donated table broke. No worrries. With a tree stump standing in, it makes another cozy little spot to hang out in the garden.

A local grape grower trimmed these for us! Our first crop this fall? (Stay tuned.)

Look who decided to bloom. (Oh little wisteria, you have no idea how close you were to being uprooted.)

Our honeysuckle reading teepee. Last week a child sitting inside yelled, “Mrs. Elisara! Come here! There’s a chrysallis at the top of the teepee!” Sure enough, a butterfly-to-be was dangling from the ceiling. (The president of the entomology club later ID’ed it.)

If you’re not familiar with Box Tops, they are the little pink coupons found on hundreds of products. Schools collect them and mail them in, receiving 10 cents for each one. It adds up, and at our school, the proceeds have been earmarked for the garden. Twice a year we receive a check. Here’s what we bought with our latest earnings: pea trellises, bean towers, seed starting mix, trays, compost, and our 3×3 raised bed frame.

Finally, it’s always good to step back and get the big picture!

Garden tour, January 2013

Posted on January 23, 2013 by kidsingardens

After a year of blogging, I celebrated and took four weeks off! (Easy to do in Zone 7!) Now I am rested and ready to tell more stories from the school garden in 2013.

For now, the garden is cold, quiet and pretty empty. Still, work goes on….

We purchased a heavy-duty weatherproof canvas cover for our kitchen island. It held up great during last week’s wet weather.

Said wet weather (though not a great volume) brought us 600 gallons of free water!

I’ve been composing a letter to my Garden Beneficials, letting them know of opportunities to be involved from now until the end of the school year. Here’s the apron I had made for each of them.

One Beneficial made a contact with a local grape grower who offered to teach us to prune correctly. I’m hoping for our first crop this year! (Grapes are nice choices for the ubiquitous school chain link fence.)

These boxes were filled with bulbs from our Flower Power Fundraiser. I haven’t been exactly sure how to use this space, so filling them with crocuses, irises and lilies to offer a little color and life in early spring seemed like a good idea.

Beneficials and students added a couple bushels of daffodils to this hillside on the backside of the garden.

On the to-do list: set gopher traps in these garden entrypoints we found when planting the daffodils.

Six tables and eight benches were delivered right before Christmas break to the junior high garden. These were purchased with local PLDO funds through Mexi-American Crafts in Ramona. Here they are awaiting a work party! (Post on this big development to follow.)

Local tree trimmers and the rangers from Heise Park keep us supplied with free woodchips. We need to spread them about once a year. It’s amazing how improved the soil is four years later, after regularly laying these down to disintegrate (as well as to “finish” the garden and suppress weeds.)

I will write more about this later but I have also begun serving as a “school garden consultant” through San Diego Master Gardeners. I met with my first school—an elementary in Escondido–last week! Here are some of the key teachers (and fellow MG consultant) in front of their kindergarten “bed”! (TOO CUTE.)

Garden Tour, August 2012

Posted on September 1, 2012 by kidsingardens

Here’s a look at what’s happening in the garden this month:

The sixth graders helped put a fresh layer of straw mulch around the fruit trees. (Note that the mulch is pulled away from the tree trunk–that’s so the trunk doesn’t get wet and disease prone.)

We’ve had luck with this blackish-purpleish heirloom tomato called “Indigo.”

Our school had a lot of remodeling and shuffling of classes this summer, and the garden ended up with an extra white board. Hanging on the fence in front of the table, it’s ideal for teaching lessons in the garden.

The five kids that served as garden ambassadors for two years are now recognized in the habitat garden.

An idea from a long time ago that I’d like to get going is to have a sensory garden. I’m thinking this might be a collection of plants in containers, so I added our first specimen this week: the irresistible “lambs ear.”

Don’t you just love volunteers, of all kinds?

Here’s a cool thing about school gardens: they are not perfectly manicured showpieces but learning spaces. So you forget about your oregano and it goes a little crazy, flowering and seeding? Leave it! It’s pretty, you can teach about the plant life cycle, and you encourage the pollinators.

Two baby milkweed plants I got from another school garden. It’s fun to think a monarch butterfly might find them; it’s also fun to think they came from a kindred project.

Our multi-purpose gazebo

Posted on May 30, 2012 by kidsingardens

It has been in the background of many posts, but now I’m putting it front and center. Our gazebo! Renovated by Garden Club members, this old, battered, brown storage unit became a delightful focal point and meeting place. For decades the structure had been sitting there, nearly invisible, until fresh eyes reimagined it.

How is our dear gazebo used? Let me count the ways. The gazebo is where…

students eat lunch
families hang out after school while siblings do extracurricular activities
reading buddies sit together to pore over books
counselors meet with students
staff hold meetings
parents snack on garden treats at Open House
events are held such as our annual tea party for Administrative Professionals Day
Garden Club members survey the work of the last three years!