Wagner Ranch School Garden

~~First I will explain a little bit about us.  We have recently been given an area of around a quarter acre of land by the local school district to develop for our school site as a learning outdoor garden classroom.  Previously this land was part of a greater nature area which the district and community uses for district environmental education programs and nature-related festivals.  The area is alive with native plants, like coffeeberry,  ceanothus, teasel, willow, heritage champagne grapes and oaks which have been central to the environmental education programs, but there are several areas of relatively unused swaths of land which we (the students and teachers) have started developing into an outdoor learning classroom.  We envision rows of radishes and rutabegas to taste and dissect, as well as an herb and lettuce garden which would supply the chef in our school cafeteria with interesting additions to the lunch menu.  We also have plans to construct a rustic enramada in the fashion of the early 1800s ranchos.  We have made some garden beds shored up with ancient British-inspired woven willow wattling and a school-made solar oven.

Our mission is to bring the concepts of living science and real-world math to all 5 senses of the student community, which we serve.  More specifically and to give examples, we look at plant cells in microscopes in the garden, we compost to add nutrient-rich soil to our growing herbs and other plants, we dig holes in the dirt at recess to witness the action of worms and other decomposers, we measure perimeters and graph coordinates of our garden plots, and we hope to harvest lettuces and herbs soon for use in the cafeteria!  We also incorporate art and literature into our garden program.  Last week we sketched daffodils, labeled the parts, and then created a final artitistic rendering for at art display.  We use story-telling to illustrate concepts which we investigate in further detail, in the garden.

We would like to focus on promoting the culinary element to our program.  We hope to increase our harvest so that we can all enjoy preparing and eating what we grow in the garden.