More Gardening!

If you're tired of reading about gardening, you may want to head over to another blog for the next few months. Amalah hardly ever talks about gardening and she is way funnier than I am, anyway.

Now back to me.

Tomorrow afternoon, a group of parents, teachers, students, and neighbors will meet on what we hope to be a beautiful spring afternoon, descend on the front lawn of Sandburg Elementary school and build a school garden. Together we will build raised beds, filling them with soil and compost, planting seedlings, and if all goes right, forming the basis of an enduring school garden community. I have been scheming this project since September, when as a new parent to the school and longtime gardener, I asked about the three fallow raised beds in the front of the school.

Frankly, I kind of drooled over them.

They had been a pet project of a staff member who had since retired. Since then, a few kind teachers have helped maintain it as best they could, but only on top of all their other duties. Summer took its toll and the weeds and lack of regular watering stunted what few plants tried to hang on. But where some saw a scraggly mess, I saw an exciting opportunity.

When I asked the principal about the raised beds, he was delighted that someone was interested in them. He said I could do anything I’d like with them. I wanted to build a garden, but before that, I knew I had to build a community. Gardens don’t take care of themselves and students who find a newly installed garden that they had no previous experience with and no buy-in on will be more inclined to damage it than appreciate it. So instead of pulling out my shovel, I pulled out my notepad and began organizing the parents and neighbors of the school.

My vision is to have teachers take their students outside to learn, to play, or just to be. I’d like kids to get dirt under their fingernails, to watch earthworms wriggle and to get fresh, outdoor air. The average kid spends 6-8 hours of every day in front of a screen. I know I can’t make that number go away, but the more we get kids outside, learning, playing and enjoying, the better. Research has linked improved test scores and behavior to outdoor play and learning experiences. School gardens are a great way to expose kids to the outdoors, and to teach them that food comes from the ground, not the grocery store.

As a friend of mine, Joe Muellenberg recently said when he was explaining the importance of building support from the community around a garden, “Community gardens are really people… that is what makes a garden.” It takes people- us- to create, grow and take care of a community garden. Aside from getting kids outside, my hope is that this will be an opportunity to build and sustain a community of students, parents, educators and neighbors, that together, are making the world a more beautiful and sustainable place.