Garden Classrooms

Our goal is to increase the number of raised garden beds to expand the vegetable gardening opportunities for the Nathan Hale Garden Club. We have approximately 35 students and our vegetable garden space is not large enough to accommodate all the members who want to participate. We would like to enlarge the variety of vegetables planted. We would like to donate the produce to local food pantries.

Namaste Charter School plans to continue the development of the school garden as a learning laboratory to incorporate nutrition and sustainable agriculture into its curriculum. Namaste would like to use this grant to plant herbs vegetables and create a butterfly garden in the raised beds. This grant will support the garden by purchasing soil test kits Earthboxes seeds plants tools gloves and curriculum materials in English and Spanish to integrate gardening activities into two classrooms.

We want to expand and add complexity and variety to our garden project. With this grant we can add 10 fruit trees to our garden purchase vegetable seeds and seedlings purchase 8 blueberry bushes 10 azalea bushes and create a floral art piece from an existing palm and grass island at our walker's and teacher entrance area and create an egret or other local birdlife topiary.

Much of the MOney will be used to further the work being accomplished at Roberts Farm Preserve. Elementary Middle and High school students have worked together and separately to construct several raised beds and three high tunnel Hoop houses. The goal is to run programming at the site this summer and to continue to bring students to Roberts farm for experiential learning data collection to learn Gardening skills and to bring the Master Gardeners program in to educate along with nutrition ed.