Arden Bucklin-Sporer - How to Grow a School Garden: A Complete Guide for Parents and Teachers

HOW TO GROW A SCHOOL GARDEN

A Complete Guide for Parents and Teachers

Arden Bucklin-Sporer and Rachel Kathleen Pringle

TIMBER PRESS
Portland * London

Frontispiece: A community of gardeners. Photo by Brooke Hieserich
Photographs are by the authors unless otherwise indicated.

Lesson plans from The Growing Classroom by Roberta Jaffe and Gary Appel (Addison-Wesley 2001). Developed by Life Lab Science and the National Gardening Association. Reprinted with permission from the National Gardening Association, South Burlington, Vermont.

Lesson plans from Earth Steward Gardener Curriculum reprinted with permission from Cultivating Community, Portland, Maine.

Lesson plans reprinted with permission from Life Lab Science Program, Santa Cruz California.

Lesson plans reprinted with permission from The Watershed Project, Richmond, California.

Copyright 2010 by Arden Bucklin-Sporer and Rachel Kathleen Pringle. All rights reserved.

Published in 2010 by Timber Press, Inc.

ISBN-13: 978-1-60469-000-2

Printed in China

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bucklin-Sporer, Arden.

How to grow a school garden : a complete guide for parents and teachers / Arden Bucklin-Sporer and Rachel Kathleen Pringle.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-60469-000-2

1. School gardens. I. Pringle, Rachel Kathleen. II. Title.

SB55.B83 2010

635dc22

2009051601

A catalog record for this book is also available from the British Library.

To Mom, who had
the good sense to send
us outside to play.
Arden

To Mom and Dad,
who decided to raise
us on the farm.
Rachel

Eager students line up for garden time. Photo by Brooke Hieserich

Parents are the engines that drive any schoolyard transformation, so this book speaks most directly to themto you. Teachers, too, are essential to the ongoing success of these projects, so we hope that this book will inspire and help educators bring an excitement about school gardens into their classrooms, and guide parents toward a meaningful involvement in school garden projects and their larger school community. School gardens are a collective effort; this book shows you how to maximize and sustain the energy within your community.

The first half of this book is about creating and developing the garden space, while the second half provides guidance for school garden programs. Building a school garden is a very accomplishable project. Developing strategies that sustain it over time, however, is infinitely more complex. In addition to guiding the transformation from schoolyard to school garden, this book describes the organizational structures that will keep it relevant, vibrant, and well utilized over time.

In the following chapters you will discover ways to get your community involved, how to raise funds and budget for a garden program, ideas on how to design a garden to best fit your site, what building materials there are to choose from, and a full section of recipes for cooking in the garden. Weve also provided tried and true tricks of the trade (chapter 7) to help you get ahead of the game: must-have materials, creative solutions to common challenges (such as watering with a group of kindergartners), and strategies to manage and channel the energy of a class of eager and enthusiastic students.

Throughout the book, weve provided quick tip sheets or to-do lists for tasks and challenges common to any school garden, such as what to do with a recalcitrant principal, how to promote a school garden, or how to stock a tool shed. Weve also provided examples of materials produced by actual school gardens, including a program overview and garden plan presented to a school community considering a potential garden project; a sample school garden budget; an annual fund letter sent to potential donors in the community; and a sample of a school garden newsletter. (Please note that names and identifying characteristics of actual individuals and institutions have been changed on all of these documents to protect their privacy.)

Parents and teachers dedicated to connecting gardening to the curriculum will find inspiration and practical guidance throughout this book. Weve provided samples of how to link garden-based lessons to standards, and how to evaluate the scope and sequence of a particular grade level or subject area with classroom teachers to incorporate lessons in the outdoor classroom. In chapter 9, Year-Round Garden Lessons and Activities weve provided some of our favorite garden lessons and lists of seasonal activities; and extensive resources for garden curricula, support, and supplies are listed in the back of the book. While the school garden is a rich environment for learning in and of itself, it also serves as an introduction to a much broader understanding of the natural world. Connecting students to a school garden can be the beginning of environmental stewardship. We hope to plant the seed that helps your project flourish.

Many years of trial and error with school gardens in the San Francisco Unified School District are behind the writing of this book. We have worked closely with school sites and garden coordinators, with teachers and principals, and with the amazing kindergarten through eighth grade students in SFUSD. They continue to be our muse. We have also worked with facilities departments, landscape crews, volunteers, parent groups, and other school garden support organizations across the country. Throughout the book, weve shared some first-person accounts of our own experience in San Francisco school gardens. We hope these stories shed some light on what it is like to be a parent building a new garden program from the ground up, or a teacher trying to harness the wonder and excitement of children at work in their garden.

A school garden is part of an ecosystem that includes students and the school community. Like any ecosystem, it is a complex twining of different life forms: a class of first graders is just one of those life forms in a school garden. Teachers, parents, students, soil bacteria, plant material, endosperm, blackbirds, Jerusalem crickets, roly-polies, and weather systems are all actors on the school garden stage, affecting one another, jostling for positions. Of course each garden is different, springing from the grass roots efforts of a school community.

Our aim is to help establish the organizing principles for any school garden, no matter how different they may look. We also want to share the lessons we have learned about how to manage and sustain a school garden by growing the community around it. Good luck and happy gardening!