School garden a success

Posted by Samantha Lane

As fall approaches, the Salida School District Garden is slowly winding down its growing season and would like to extend a thank you to our community. In the spring of 2010, school district employees felt that students in the school district would greatly benefit from having a school garden. The garden project was created to engage students in locally grown foods, teach students better eating habits, connect the community with our school district, generate money for school activities, and connect gardening with school curriculum.

By working with district administration, local businesses, and volunteers, the garden club was able to begin planning how we could make the garden a reality. Through generous donations of time and resources the district was able to see a dream become a reality. The garden club would like to thank all of our generous donors! Donors include: Outerspaces Landscaping (equipment use, landscape materials, and labor), Brady’s West (a truck full of starter plants), Hylton Lumber (wood for raised beds), Fred Lowry (soil), Bill Thomas (compost), Paul Campbell (soil), Country Bounty (fund-raiser), Poncha Lumber (fencing material),Carrie Driver(donation), Cheryl Rauschke(master gardener expertise, seeds, starter plants, photo gallery), Maggie Gaddis (ecological and educational expertise), Tony Madone (starter plants), Pam Smith and Adrienne Everette (bulbs), and student and parent volunteers (labor). Thank you all so much for all of your help!

The 2009 sixth grade class started the project by creating designs of the garden using educational techniques that satisfied Colorado State Math standards. Students learned to calculate area, perimeter, volume, and measurements using both metric and customary systems. After creating designs, the students began the process of building the raised beds for the garden area. The students built 8-4’X12’x2’ beds. The students seemed to thoroughly enjoy being able to learn classroom material in a real world setting. After the completion of the boxes, volunteer students, parents and community members came together to fill the boxes with soil and compost and then plant the actual beds. The garden has been a great success for our first growing season. During the summer, the garden club staff was able to engage students in over 100 contact hours of garden maintenance, planting and harvesting. All proceeds generated from the garden will go into the garden fund for future developments. The garden hopes to install a storage shed and green house into the future.

If you have an interest in donating time or resources to the garden please contact Samantha Lane at slane@salida.k12.co.us or Bryan Lamont at blamont@salida.k12.co.us. Happy Fall!