LILA School Garden

Our school garden is part of a community garden located on school property. It is an in-ground vegetable garden with an automatic watering system. It measures 38X14 square feet and is divided by 4 beds. The garden has been available for use for a long time, but it has never been sustained. At the beginning of the 2013-14 school year, we started managing it differently. One administrator (Nadjiba Medjaoui) was assigned to manage the garden, and she promptly applied for the Whole Kids Foundation Grant. Parents donated time, material and labor to launch the garden! We started plowing, weeding and fertilizing the soil, seedling, and plating with great results! Last school year, students staying in afterschool care were able to visit and maintain the garden almost every day. They had the chance to harvest and taste the vegetables! This year we were able to involve teachers and classrooms. We have 8 classes that come to the garden weekly and they are involved in all the steps from weeding to harvesting. The grant not only gave us the ability to acquire plants and seeds, tools and material, and curriculum material, it also allowed us to host speaker who educated our students about composting. This is the next project that we want to develop with the material we just bought with the grant!