School/Community Garden Success

We opened our new School/Community Garden at Green Gables Elementary School this past spring after a few years of planning and fundraising and construction. The garden has turned out to be a tremendous success—more successful than we ever imagined it would be!!! The garden has provided countless benefits to our school, individual gardeners, and our neighborhood as a whole.

The garden has been a huge hit for the students and teachers at the school—everyone loves to be out in the garden and outdoor classroom. Teachers are finding new ways throughout the school year to connect the garden to the curriculum in writing, math, science, and more! We are also starting a new after-school Garden Club this month to provide even more ways for students to connect with, learn from, and contribute to the garden.

Of course, the garden produced lots and lots of food. The gardeners all said their 12x12 plots produced more food than expected. Everyone learned a lot about what to plant, how many of each type of plant to plant, etc. We have a partnership to donate extra produce to the food bank at Westwoods Church in our neighborhood and are looking forward to seeing how many pounds of produce we can donate this coming summer.

The garden has become a neighborhood gathering place for classes and workshops—we held classes on cooking, preserving herbs, and conserving water, among others. We will have a whole workshop series this coming summer as well! Additionally, neighbors just love to come to walk through the garden and see how it changes and evolves.

Our garden has helped build an exceptional connection between the school and the community—volunteers from the neighborhood helped with the construction of the garden (several people came to help even if they didn’t want to be on the list to have a garden plot—they said they just wanted to help us have a community garden in our neighborhood). Neighbors have also helped in school classes, and over 20 neighbors signed up to water and tend the school’s plots over the summer when school was not in session.

When we started planning the garden several years ago, we looked at this unused, weedy, overlooked section of the schoolyard and dreamed of what it could possibly be. Now we can hardly imagine what our lives, our school, and our neighborhood would be without it!