A few weeks ago Classroom teacher Ms. Mayes and I gave her 3rd grade class an option to either write a piece for publication in our e-news or do some garden chores. The students who chose to write a piece were given a specific subject – Why Should Schools Have Gardens? It was rewarding for us […]

  Did you know that school gardens are a huge part of the Farm to School movement? We didn’t realize just how huge until we attended this month’s Farm to School Conference in Columbia (which featured one of Gateway Greening’s member gardens, the Falcon Garden at Halls Ferry Elementary! Go Falcons!). Over and over again, […]

This year, I’ve visited the community garden at Crown Center for Senior Living and worked with the Happy Planters, the garden club there. One of the projects we undertook was using the greenhouse they have there to grow sweet potato slips not only for their garden but for the Youth Garden Sweet Potato Challenge. The […]

We celebrated Thanksgiving a little early at Clay with a meal we grew in our garden– kale chips and roasted sweet potatoes!   Cooking at school can be a challenge. Last year, we brought a portable fire pit to the school and roasted potatoes and onions in a real fire outside by the garden. This […]

According to LaManda Joy the author of Start A CommunityFood Garden, Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) is an approach that helps communities and groups focus on what they do have instead of what they don’t. The ABCD approach is very powerful because instead of creating anxiety about what a community may be lacking it encourages group to celebrate […]

What’s driving you crazy in your school garden? For this 1st grader, it’s a giant weed that refuses to be pulled out.     There’s a difference between the ongoing tasks of a school garden– mulching, watering, everyday weeding– that cause us stress, and the individual stressors that I like to call ‘tolerations’.   A […]

We celebrated Earth Day at Clay this week by learning about trees. In the words of one of our students, “Trees help keep the earth clean!” We learned how to figure out how old a tree is by counting the rings in a stump, and we made leaf rubbings with different types of tree leaves. […]

Here’s a short and sweet lesson on soil and composting! This can be adapted well from 2nd grade all the way through high school, depending on how much students already know. Start with the Earth Apple activity, which sets some great context for how little topsoil we have on Earth that we can actually grow food […]

When the lettuce is starting to form heads, and the chive flowers are purple and poofy, we know it’s time to enjoy the fruits of our hard work! Here’s how we make salad with PK-2nd grade at Clay. Supplies: tub or bucket for washing dishes tub or bucket for rinsing lettuce sponge(s) dish soap (biodegradable) […]