Jones Elementary Recovers from an Overgrown Summer Garden
Has this ever happened to your school garden? Summer can be a time when no one is available to tend the school garden. Many of us choose to cover garden beds with attached black plastic to keep weed seeds from germinating. Ideally, community members or school staff maintain a garden in the summer and get to reap its benefits. These before and after photos show how Jones’ gardening committee (parents and school staff) pitched in on two Sunday Gardening Days in September to clear weeds and add amendments. Jones’ is back in the gardening game!
Jones Elementary has had an active school garden for at least five years. This year they underwent a change in Garden Committee leadership. At first Jennifer Jacobs (pictured) felt nervous about taking the lead with the garden. We were able to connect Laura Tew, one of our Master Gardener Mentors. She has worked with a number of schools with gardens and answered most of Jennifer’s questions. Please let us know if you know anyone who is interested in this program.
Here we see kindergartners ready to harvest sweet potato plants and planting radishes. Students stand in the low areas of the rows and plant in high areas because the beds are quite large. Jennifer pulls 3 to 4 students at a time from Ms. Novo’s Spanish class to plant!
No comments:
Post a Comment