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	Photo: Lori A. Cheung

Students at many schools across Alameda will have a welcome treat when they return to class in August: the fruits—and vegetables—of their hard spring labor. From Bay Farm Island to the West End, and at elementary and middle schools in between, students, teachers and parent volunteers have turned corners of their school grounds into vibrant, living classrooms that literally bear fruits and vegetables.
    At Edison Elementary School, more than 40 parent volunteers, led by a core team called the Garden Crew, ensure that their students spend time in the school’s outdoor classroom throughout the school year and during the summer break.
    “Over the summer, the garden’s irrigation is on a timer,” explains Laura DiDonato, an Edison parent and certified Master Gardener. “The crops that are ripe in the summer are harvested by any volunteer that feels like doing some maintenance in exchange, and we always leave some plants that go to seed so that the students can see the entire life cycle.”
    Edison’s Parent Teacher Association funds the garden program, but the group also used grants from Alameda County Waste Management and other organizations to launch the effort. DiDonato notes that the school plants three times a year so that there are crops growing yearround, providing multiple lessons on the full cycle of life.
    “Mostly we plant crops that do not ripen until school is back in session. The students’ first lesson usually involves a treasure hunt through the garden (to also familiarize themselves) and eating a sumptuous watermelon at the end,” DiDonato says.

RUNNING A SUSTAINABLE SCHOOL GARDEN

    It was when DiDonato was first working with a small team of Edison parents to cultivate the idea of a school garden that she learned about the Master Gardener program, an offering from the University of California Cooperative Extension on Bay Farm Island. The program that year, with its mandate toward community and school gardening, focused on sustainable agriculture in an urban environment—just the ticket for creating and maintaining a garden effort at Edison.

    DiDonato graduated from the five-month program and then set her sights on the Edison garden, knowing that there was a group of dedicated people available. The Garden Crew convinced the principal of the idea of an outdoor classroom, instead of individual beds, which “put too much pressure on each teacher to make sure their garden is up and running,” DiDonato explains.
    Early donations in the launch provided supplies: magnifying lenses, spiral notebooks for journals and weather tools such as barometers and temperature and rain gauges. DiDonato and the team worked with an architect, who happens to be a neighbor with a vested interest in beautifying the community. They built the existing structure on a corner of the school’s lot and also created a habitat area with an interpretive sign about butterflies. A wooden box holds a helpful pamphlet titled Create Butterfly Habitat in your Own Backyard.
    The Garden Crew worked with an outside consultant to adapt lesson plans from a variety of sources. Using the lesson plans and giving the volunteers an initial training session got the ball rolling early in the school year. “No green thumb necessary,” DiDonato insists.
    Each month, garden docents teach a different lesson that is not grade-specific, but “really do-able and not reliant on the teacher to create,” says DiDonato. Example lessons include teaching about bugs and insects, worms and ladybugs, as well as how to incorporate the garden into art, science, literature and poetry. The kids receive journals in kindergarten, which they keep throughout their tenure in the school.
    Long-term sustainability was key for DiDonato and her crew when they were building the program. They created a Yahoo! group online, using it to communicate electronically, saving money and paper. The lesson plans are attached to weekly bulletins; the list serves as a place for any questions.
    “From the get-go, we set up the program with a ‘temporary-ness-is-OK’ approach. It’s freeing to not place incredible expectations on any one parent or group of parents to keep the garden growing,” DiDonato explains. “We just need to make sure that the knowledge of the program gets transferred to the next generation.”

VEGETABLES, BUTTERFLIES AND A MEADOW

 

 

    Another successful school garden project is the Outdoor Learning Center Program at Bay Farm School, which focuses on environmental education. In contrast to Edison’s single outdoor classroom, each class at Bay Farm has its own small garden plot, and the entire school shares a butterfly garden and habitat. “Through the butterfly habitat we teach them many things, about the butterfly life cycle, insects, even art classes go into the butterfly garden to draw what they see,” says Marla Lee, a volunteer parent and Master Gardener, like Edison’s DiDonato, who drives Bay Farm’s program.
    The Bay Farm project began eight years ago when a group of volunteers built raised beds for each of the classrooms. But Lee observes the difficulty in keeping volunteer efforts motivated. “Great at the outset, but it’s hard to keep up,” she says. That’s when the PTA stepped in to fund a part-time garden coordinator. Leslie Outhier works with 13 to 15 classes per week for the school’s kindergarten through sixth grades. A typical class might be filling buckets full of seed balls, a combination of clay, compost and seed.
    Lee notes that the need for seed balls came about because they had tried to plant a small field using seeds, only to have the birds and the wind and the spring rains carry them away. “Seed balls are our next strategy after throwing seeds.”
    In addition to life lessons, Lee and Outhier use structured lesson plans that incorporate the critical California Learning Standards. In kindergarten, first and second grades, the students learn about the “LAWS” of gardening, the acronym for the life cycle of land, air, water and sunlight. The upper grades have fenced-in beds, where they work together on vegetable and flower gardens that have critical tie-ins to what they are learning in the classroom. The school has a comprehensive and successful composting program.
    “Just digging in the garden is not enough to follow the standards in education set by the state of California for science, math and language arts,” Lee says. “We closely align lesson plans with the California standards and work to fulfill the requirements with the garden coordinator.”
    Lee also explains that the garden project provides a sensory experience for the children. “We make sure that when they work in the garden, they use all of their senses—what they see, hear, smell, feel—it’s all part of the experience.” The kids love the feel of lamb’s ear, a plant with soft, “furry” leaves, for example.
    Two years ago, as a follow-up to the classroom gardens, 100 volunteers, including contractors, parents and students, worked on creating the Bay Farm butterfly garden. They built arbors and gates and installed signs for a self-guided tour. Using grants from a number of local sources, including East Bay Municipal Utility District, they installed an irrigation system as well as a donated fountain. The butterfly garden is now a stop on many public garden tours.
    Creating a natural environment has been a learning experience for everyone. In the butterfly garden, Lee has been working to grow “host specific” plants, teaching the children (and the visitor) that certain species of butterfly larvae depend solely on specific plants as a food source. Unfortunately, progress sometimes gets in the way. The sprinklers that Alameda Unified School District installed create too much water for the natives Lee is trying to grow naturally and “the parents want to pull the weeds,” she laughs. “They don’t understand that you need the ‘weeds’ to create the right environment for the butterflies to thrive.”

PROMOTING NUTRITION IN CONTAINER GARDENS

   
    While gardens can help teach about natural environments, life cycles and composting, they can also teach about good health and nutrition. With that in mind, Miller Elementary School is using a $15,000 three-year grant from the California Nutrition Network to promote nutrition through garden work. Barb Wenger is Miller’s on-staff intervention coordinator. Her side gig is leading the effort for the Alameda West End school’s garden program alongside fifth-grade teacher Barbara Murchison.
    Murchison says that because of the lack of land at Miller and an oversupply of direct sun, she thought it was important to find alternate methods of gardening. The women launched the project two years ago, first using mini-grants from organizations such as Kids in the Garden and The Watershed Project, to create a butterfly garden in large wooden barrels.
    “We work with containers because of the blacktop. But we think it’s still important to teach the kids about the commitment to get active and improve their environment, beautify the community,” Murchison says. “They deserve more than a parking lot.”
    As the fifth-grade teacher at Miller, Murchison finds it easy to tie the garden work into the California science and math standards. But the project is definitely not limited to the fifth grade. Like the other schools in Alameda, the focus is on organic gardening and growing as many native plants as possible. The grades share the boxes, providing an entire school effort. “It is our ‘garden’ not our ‘box’,” Murchison emphasizes. “We made sure that each student planted something.”
    But it’s a lot of hard work, with the teachers devoting considerable extra time. And while other schools have a ready list of parent volunteers, it’s not as easy at Miller school, with its military population. “It’s tough to get parent involvement due to the transitional nature of the school,” Wenger comments.
    The requirements of the grant follow the goals of the California Nutrition Network:  to educate students on eating five fruits and vegetables a day, increase physical activity to at least 60 minutes each day and achieve full participation in federal food assistance programs. The grant funds a part-time nutrition/garden instructor who teaches 40- to 60-minute sessions to half of each class. These lessons offer a wealth of information about using garden and food journals, the food pyramid, serving sizes and food group lessons, in addition to the garden aspects.
    In compliance with the grant, Miller educators teach about nutrition in the classroom, abiding by the California academic standards, while the part-time coordinator handles the nutrition in the garden. “There will be a lot of tasting and snacks, to teach what comes from the earth. Even if the crops aren’t ready to harvest, we will still be teaching about these foods,” Wenger says. “We are taking gardens and using them as a means to a larger end. We are meeting academic standards while measuring something real, like a vegetable or a flower.”

BEYOND THE GARDEN WALLS

    In addition to learning about composting, recycling and gardening, students at Lincoln Middle School collect eggs from the seven chickens in the school’s large nature area. Designed before the school was built in 1976, the Reneé Healy Environmental Center is named after a former PTA president and borders the San Leandro Bay. The center has a pond with turtles and fish, a barn full of tools and is sprinkled with benches handmade by the students. Juanita Lex, a retired science teacher from Lincoln School, helped design the area and still drops in occasionally to help.
    “At one point we had a full menagerie of animals, including turkeys, pheasants and guinea fowl,” she boasts. Although those animals are now gone, Lex can point out the many fruit trees in the orchard and the water lilies that border the pond. Today, Kelli Green, a Lincoln physical education teacher, heads up an elective class in which the students keep the center running by mowing and pruning, planting and beautifying.
    “When I took this class on in 1992, I wanted the kids to do meaningful work,” Green says. The participating students have a long list of chores to take care of every day, including the care and feeding of the chickens and ring-necked doves, yard work and collecting the recycling throughout the entire school plant.
    Meanwhile, a group of parents at Paden Elementary School is actively preparing to convert a stretch of the waterfront into green space and a part of the Bay Trail. The plan is to widen the area by 60 feet, add picnic tables and a telescope and provide an area for educational learning activities. They have backing from the Alameda City Council, the Public Works Commission and the Alameda Recreation and Parks Department, all of which are seeking funding for the project.
    Many other schools in Alameda have garden projects in process or with plans in place to get started any time. By combining the critical element to make it happen—the laws of nature and enthusiastic volunteers—students will reap the benefits for many years to come.      

MASTER GARDENER PROGRAM

Who Ya Gonna Call?

 

Want to grow a school or community garden and don’t know how to begin? Have a question about getting rid of those pesky aphids on your roses? Call a Master Gardener.
    Master Gardeners are a group of volunteers who have completed a training course provided by the University of California Cooperative Extension. Since 1981, the mission of the Alameda-based Cooperative Extension has been to bring research-based information into communities to help people improve their lives. Master Gardeners assist the Cooperative Extension through gardening programs and horticultural activities designed to educate the public.
    According to Kathy Hofmann, Master Gardener coordinator for the Cooperative Extension, the program is a basic horticulture class focusing on two areas:  IPM, or Inte-grated Pest Management, and getting more involved in school and community gardens.
    Hofmann notes that the program uses a list of the 100 schools in Alameda County with gardens to help the volunteer effort. “We try to match schools with a gardener who will act as a consultant, helping them create the right group of resources that will help a school garden flourish,” she explains. Though a consultant Master Gardener will not actually plant the garden, he will advise about what to plant, how to set up a program and also help train the parents on maintaining the program.
    The Master Gardener program consists of a 16-week course that meets once a week from January through May. University professors lecture on various topics, such as weeds, composting and deciduous fruit trees. It is a competitive program; you must send in an application for acceptance. Key in the acceptance process is the willingness to volunteer.
    Graduates are required to put in 60 hours of volunteer work in Alameda County following the first year of certification and 25 hours each year subsequently. Volunteer opportunities abound in Alameda County schools, farmers markets, garden shows and Earth Day events. Graduates also staff the Plant Doctor Hotline, a phone line where perplexed callers can get an answer to their questions about gardening and managing the pests in their gardens in organic ways.

RESOURCES

 

WEB SITE: http://acmg.ucdavis.edu/

PLANT DOCTOR HOTLINE:
Alameda (510) 639-1371
Livermore  (925) 960-9420