School Garden Tour

For the last 3 years,I've been lucky enough to take care of the school garden at our kids school.  This year has been our best yet.  In the Fall. the kids planted each bed with one to two varieties of vegetable.  We planted this way so everyone would be able to share in the what we planted.  Now that it's harvest time, we take a classes out and pull enough organic veggies to make a salad.  Parent volunteers wash, prepare the salad and serve it to the class.  I just love it. 

 I took a bunch of photos yesterday and wanted to share what going on out there.

  

Last week the school district delivered and spread out mulch all over the garden floor.   I'm so thankful to the people that made this happen.  

 

We're looking for parent volunteers to help lay about 30 more pavers to this path. 

The carrot patch.  So far this patch has feed about 6 classes, about 150 kids.  We still have many more classes to go before we run out of carrots.  Things I've learned about growing carrots a) If the little kids pull the tops off and leave the carrot in the ground, the carrot sends up need leaves. b) We add the carrot tops to the salads, just chop it up like an herb.  c) you can plant 16 carrot seeds to each square foot in the garden.  Plant in four rows of four.

Red cabbage- we grab two large leaves and add to the salad.  This bed is raised high to accommodate our students in wheelchairs.  It's time to add some more soil to this bed, it's sunk about a foot.

This bed is aHere we have a mix of lettuce and onions. 

The onions are blooming and the kids seem to like them in the salad too.

Mystery Veggie?  Anyone know what this is??

Hey mister sunflower!

When I take the classes out to the garden I just wing it.  One class found a bounty of sunflower seeds on the ground and wanted to plant them, so we did.  And look whats growing!

This bed features cabbage, lettuce and another mystery plant.

Kale- this bed is a slow grower, we need to plant more kale seed stat.

Kohlrabi, artichoke and lettuce.  The kids sometimes spill their seeds all over the ground before they make it into the beds.  We started to notice lots of lettuce ground all over the ground.  One our teachers started to transplant the little seedling out of the ground and started growing them in the beds.  

This class planted twice, the first round of seeds produced nothing, so they replanted and wow!

So we have a lot of lettuce!

Radish and Spinach

Our Butterfly Garden needs some love.  I'm hoping a family or scout troop adopts this space soon.  We need to plant some more milkweed and other monarch friendly plants. 

Volunteers are awesome.  One of our Grandparent volunteers taught the Kindergarten kids about soil. 

Our Orange Tree- it needs some love too!

This Mural which is also the back fence, was donated by one our local Girl Scout Troops.  The plants we're plant by another troop. 

Apple Tree-we had one apple on the tree and now it's gone, someone or something ate it, I knew it was not for long.

So why is this year different in the garden?  We have volunteers.  One class has a retired principle who brings the kids outside to the garden for science.  He built this worm shelter for our vermiculture bins.

 

The Grape Vine.  I need to trim this up, it will be huge soon.  The bares fruit in the summer.

These carrots are really tasty.  The kids LOVE them.

So there you have it.  If you have any questions about the garden let me know.