Need to Claim and Tame Your Schoolyard Garden?

by Mary Van Dyke, August 22 2015
Gone away for a few weeks and come home to find your garden has turned into a jungle? Weeds are thigh-high, the herbs and flowers in pots have shriveled, and the tomatoes and pumpkins are rampant. This is the scenario when I return to my home garden after a summer vacation, and it can play out in your schoolyard garden too.

So how to "claim and tame" your schoolyard garden after the summer?

• Do you already have parent volunteers set up a family summer-watering and weeding schedule?
• Can you outreach to volunteers such as Master Gardeners and Master Naturalists to help “adopt a plot”?
• Have you set up a community garden in your schoolyard?

This year at Jamestown Elementary School, we do not have family community buy-in to water or weed during the summer months. The schoolyard maintenance crew continues to visit every two weeks to mow and trim the grassy areas. The custodians in their spare time, water and harvest the vegetables: including beans, pumpkins, kale and lettuce. In late August, the PTA will hire a contractor to trim and mulch the week before school begins. The rest of the gardens will need to be reclaimed and tamed again when school begins in September.  I am planning a couple of community schoolyard maintenance sessions with Master Naturalists and the PTA for early October and in the spring. Maybe a Master Naturalist will take on to maintain a native plant meadow? These Saturday sessions will help engage some families to help on other garden learning projects too, and be part of our strategy this year to involve more staff and students in learning outdoors.

I “claim and tame” my home garden after summer vacation by: 

1. Weeding: i.e. remove the fastest growing, most dangerous, or most prolific weeds
2. Watering
3. Harvesting

In a couple of hours I remove:

Poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans) seedling

• A dozen poison ivy seedlings
• A dozen mulberry seedlings
• A dozen wild grape vine seedlings
• Several kinds of weeds, prioritizing those in the garden with lots of seeds: including lambs quarters (you can eat this one), pigweed, kochia, sow thistle, horseweed, white heath aster and crabgrass.
• Less disruptive weeds I leave for next time!

Mulberry seedling

Wild grape seedling

While in the garden, I take time to enjoy the outdoors and sunshine, and I pick green and red tomatoes to ripen indoors on a window cill.  


 I water the pots of strawberries, herbs and basil, and harvest potatoes and gourds.


Then I pick a bunch of beautiful native flowers for the table. 


While working I listen to the birds, see a tiger swallowtail butterfly, and get stung by a wasp!
But now I know where wasps are nesting. I cook the potatoes with basil for supper.


Next week I’ll start to reclaim and tame the schoolyard. 

• What will be the main "weeds" this year?
• What will be in flower?
• What vegetables, fruit and herbs will be ready to harvest?
• What animals and birds will be there?
• Who will be interested to learn in the schoolyard?

Reference:
Weed Identification for Schools by Mary Van Dyke

Next blog:
A Guide to Nature Through the Seasons

The Potato Project: Planting with Montessori (Part 2)

The Montessori class greets me singing the planting action-song to the tune of The Farmer's in the Dell.

This is the second session of The Potato Project so we quickly recap our introduction to potatoes (link to blog of the first session).

Today, I have brought in a trug of the seed potatoes that have been sitting on my window sill for a couple of weeks to sprout. This morning I cut each potato in half and the cut-side has already healed and is dry.
We have a selection of red potatoes, purple potatoes and white potatoes.

A student asks, "Why do we cut the potatoes in half?"
The answer is that we don't have to cut the potatoes. A new potato plant will grow from one whole potato tuber.  But if we cut them in half and each half has a shoot, then we might get two new plants instead of just one!

Vocabulary enrichment includes: trench, shovel, trowel, potato, worm, mugwort, weed, root, shoot. I have brought a wriggling worm and a pulled mugwort weed into the class in my trug basket to discuss before we go outside.

We go outside to plant the potatoes.

As well as rich vocabulary and potential for literacy in the garden, there is also lots of room for math in the garden.  I have already prepared two trenches. We divide the class into two groups. One half of the class weeds another bed that is full of mugwort and worms, while the other half plants their "seed potatoes" in the trench. I have calculated the numbers of potatoes per child and also the dimensions of the bed and spacing needs of the potato plants.

It is fun to dig about four inches or 10 centimeters (a K or pre-schooler's hand depth).
We look at the four inch line too on the trowels. Then plant the potato with cut-side down and shoots up. Cover the potato with a few inches of soil.

It is wet today so we don't need to water the newly planted potatoes.

Each group of students also weeds another bed where the first graders will soon plant more vegetables. The Montessori students find lots of worms and a white grub - and pulled out lots of mugwort weeds.

Next steps:
Each week the students can check the potatoes.

• When will the potato plants sprout?
• Do the potato plants need watering or weeding?
• When the potato plants start to sprout leaves we can cover the shoots with soil to leave a few leaves above. The extra soil will keep the growing potato tubers covered underground.
• Do we need to protect the potato plants from wildlife?

Resources:
Weed Identification for Schools by Mary Van Dyke, ebook to download and print

Preschool: The Planting Song
The Farmer plants the seeds
The Farmer plants the seeds
Hi, Ho and Cherry O
The Farmer plants the seeds

and repeat for other verses

The rain begins to fall
The sun begins to shine
The plants begin to grow
The buds all open up
The flowers smile at me

Click to find blog of the first session of The Potato Project