Earth Day,and Wednesday

One of my colleagues had the idea to have our students give a gift of trees back to the school for their promotion gift. She thought fruit trees might be nice, and BOY did I jump on it. So the kids could bring in two dollars - one dollar to wear a hat on earth day when we planted the trees, and then second went for a homework pass. I bought the trees (four peach trees) and one of our students has a dad who is a horticulturalist and he donated 3 blueberry bushes.

The Dad came and spoke to all of the kids about his job. He sells plants/trees/bushes wholesale to other nurseries. He explained that if he wanted to sell 10,000 trees then he needed to have seedlings numbering around 14,000. The kids could NOT understand how he did it. He kept explaining, and they kept wanting to know if he got his seeds from Walmart or the local nursery. I would show pictures of the students planting all of them, but I just didn't think it ethical to post other people's children on the blog without permission, so you'll have to do with seeing the horticulturalist, and my daughter standing next to one of the peach trees. The interesting thing is that since then, the students all argue at lunch to see who gets to water the trees.

Now I have been trying to get grants to start a vegetable garden at school without luck, so I took the 4 trees and 3 bushes as the first of a lot of steps I/we would need to take to bring this to life at our school. My principal came to me and said Verizon wanted to make a donation to the school and send a group of volunteers to help us do "something green" and since she knew I was VERY interested in the garden idea she gave me $300.00 to start one. The local Home Depot gave us a generous discount, and I bought 3 raised garden beds, and all the soil/compost we needed, for under $300 and brought it back to school. This past Wednesday my morning math/science 5th graders built the beds with the volunteers, and the afternoon group mixed the bags of soil, conditioner, and compost. Both groups have already started bean and cucumber plants in school, but now they are thinking they want to take t hem home instead of putting them in the garden. Our summer kids (some are in a "daycare camp" at school while their parents work) will continue the garden, and harvest the peaches, whatever blueberries we can save from birds, and the garden veggies to donate them to our local foodbank. They will then start seeds for the fall veggies. All of this is planted right along the preschool/kindergarten fence, so as the little kids come out to play in their special playground they can watch the plants grow right there.

We are all very excited to watch this project unfold, and I'm hoping I can turn more kids on to gardening this way, and reinforce that plants make their own seeds, and you don't have to go to a store to get them.