On Thursday, Sycamore Valley Elementary’s science teacher Kim Lawrence joined me to kick off our Garden Club that meets on Thursdays at lunchtime. We have 7 weeks of fun planned to teach these eager 5th graders about where their food comes from, the power food has to make them healthy and strong, and how to care for the earth to grow more nutritious food.

During our 7 weeks we will be growing and harvesting spinach and radishes, setting up a worm composter fed with scraps from the school cafeteria and planting a living wall to adorn our school with live art!

While the kids ate their lunches, we let them pull a leaf off a basil plant and wrap it around cherry tomatoes grown in an Earthbox. I was pleasantly surprised that almost all the kids took up the culinary challenge!

After eating, we assembled one of the two Earthboxes that will plant radish and spinach seeds in next week. The kids then took turns filling the Earthbox with handfuls of organic soil, dolomite and organic fertilizer. In our last few minutes together, they learned about how the plants will get their water from a reservoir at the bottom of the box rather than from water sprinkled on top of the seeds. More on watering and developing a watering schedule next week!