Green Apple Day of Service
Today is a beautiful crisp fall morning for our Green Apple Day of Service at Jamestown Elementary School!
Green Apple Day of Service is an initiative run by the Center for Green Schools at the US Green Building Council to help promote service learning in schools here in the US and around the world. Green Apple Day of Service - like Earth Day is on a specific day - but you can schedule your event to suit your community. The Green Apple website has plenty of how-to’s on organizing service events: flyer templates, web advertising, media toolkits, email signatures and yes, merchandizing too. We use the website and flyer to advertise our event - as a native plant habitat restoration in the front entrance area of the school. I look at the checklist to make sure our event planning is on track.
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| Downloadable Resources from greenapple.org include banners, badges, email signatures |
Landscape issues
There’s already some native and ornamental plants in Jamestown’s front entrance garden - but I notice there are also lots of fast growing weeds and many large areas of bare brown mulch. First, we identify the weeds. Alan digs some weed samples up - roots and all - and we identify and label them: dandelion, crabgrass and mugwort.
- Dandelions grow deep and need to be dug out.
- Crabgrass spreads by rhizomes, underground stem
- Mugwort re-grows from tiny parts of broken underground stem
Why are these weeds thriving in this garden area? We dig deeper into the mulch.
Tom finds the crabgrass roots are layered like a cake and are over a foot deep! Yu-hsin and Wendy find a tangled network of bindweed roots under the top layer of mulch.
What’s happening? Once or twice a year, this garden bed is weed-whacked and mulched over by a maintenance crew. The intentions are admirable, and the routine of weed-whacking and over-mulching is the norm for maintenance crews here. But this ground maintenance method actually worsens our weed problem. Only 8 weeks after being mown to the ground and mulched by the crew the weeds are back in force. The crabgrass, mugwort and the bindweed all re-grow new plants and sprout easily from the tiny parts of broken underground stems. These weeds grow a new mat of roots up into the new layer of mulch and then sprout up above ground. The weeds outcompete the ornamental and native plants we are trying to cultivate.
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| Mugwort |
Plant Native Plants to Enhance Biodiversity
With 30 or so people here today we accomplish a lot of work and have time to play. We plant native plants that are not yet in the schoolyard that will help increase the biodiversity in this garden area.
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| Watering newly planted Fothergilla |
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| Planting Aster |
I select the native plants from Plant NOVA Natives to be tolerant of the extreme conditions in our school garden and for beauty in the fall and spring as well as summer. We also plant purple and yellow pansies for instant effect and beauty. Some plants I bought at a market, most are donated native seedlings. Let’s hope these new plants will take root, and we and our native wildlife can enjoy their flowers and foliage over the next year or two.
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| Visit PlantNOVANatives.org for more information |
Conversations and Community in Action
We chat while we work: this is community politics in action and at the heart of service learning and sustainability. We talk about longer term needs. Should we consider alternative management practices? If weed whacking and mulching doesn’t work - what will? How do we lessen the “weed bank”?
Options we bandy around include:
- annual “weed-whacking and mulch” maintenance with the landscape crew as usual, augmented by another Green Apple Day, or
- apply chemical weed-killers, or
- mechanically remove the entire soil structure and redesign the whole front area to include a playground, or
- pave over this entire area too if the school is ever rebuilt
These are only some of the options to consider: each comes with environmental and social pros and cons and issues. For example, we need to remember that chemical weed-killers are not allowed on school grounds. Inevitably each option comes with a price tag. While we work today we are visited by John, videographer from Arlington Public Schools Green Scene. John interviews many of the people here today about the event. Here is the link to his Green Scene film compiling three schools Green Apple Days of Service - including Jamestown's. I enjoy chatting and meeting people too, and I come away with many impressions, including a Pennsylvania Dutch recipe for eating dandelions with bacon dressing.
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| Planting Rudbeckia - Black-eyed Susan |
Collective Impact and Green Apple Days
Several people tell me they enjoy the morning, and ask me if we could arrange more outdoor Green Apple Days over the year. To me that’s a sure sign of success. Although this garden area at the front entrance of the school needs ongoing maintenance, we have to consider what other projects could use collective attention and time. There are plenty of other places in the schoolyard for service projects and that might attract community to join in. Maybe at our next Green Apple Day of Service we could pull invasive vines off the trees and shrubs in our wood area near the school? Or we could beautify the native plantings on the other side of the school or we could look after the vegetable patch? All of these jobs can be done easily by groups. Together we can accomplish far more than any one of us could do alone - and we help our school look beautiful, be a more healthy community and we learn while we work. This is collective impact, and service learning and a reason to have another Green Apple Day!
Thank you!
With thanks to many for enabling our first Jamestown Green Apple Day of Service including:
Alan, Anisa, Barbara, Bethany, Carl, Chris, Clementina, David, Elizabeth, Eric, Jason, Jade, Jenn, Jerome, John, Jose, Kenwyn, Phil, Susan, Tom, Wendy, William, Yu-hsin, the Navigators families and all the Jamestown community families helping today!
Resource Links
Green Scene video Green Apple Days of Service at Jamestown, Abingdon and Discovery ES
Jamestown Elementary School
Jamestown Elementary School
Article by Mary Van Dyke
Mary Van Dyke is Visiting Horticulturalist at Jamestown Elementary School, Arlington, VA, where she facilitates outdoor learning and the outdoor classrooms. Mary was recently recognized by The Center for Green Schools with their Good Apple award for her work promoting healthy, safe and sustainable learning environments.
