A new Child Nutrition Bill that recognizes the importance of School Gardens in teaching good healthy nutrition

Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010

Some notes from the field

Jennifer Donnellan wrote


"Today with the 4th graders Alisha Molloy and I planted many bulbs in both beds and had the kids take out tomato, squash, eggplant vines that are done for the year.  The kids enjoyed both tasks and were challenged with digging holes deep enough for bulbs and working together to accomplish what we asked. They watered the bulbs when finished. Most of both beds in the garden were used but the one with the white stick has some more room.

We removed the wire tomato cages and placed them inside the garden near the scarecrow. Outside the garden near the wood chip pile we left vines from the vegetables.   There is also a barrel of green tomatoes and a few radishes and single eggplants that may or may not be good.  This barrel is inside the garden.  We let the 4th graders take home 1-2 vegetables in bags.They were excited about this!"

Kirsten Stilgenbauer wrote

"I was with Crowe's class every time they were out there, and they all sent me thank you notes - soooo cute!!!"

"This week seems to have gone really well!  Mr. Bellar said they have come out to water for a little bit at their designated time, but have also come out several times for various reasons, such as completing a worksheet about living vs. non-living things.  Mrs Jones had her class write a journal and this kept the children very focused on their garden activity."

"Hey there, I was in the garden this morning with Jones' class....it looks like we had some visitors last night in the garden.  The deer did kind of clear out the lettuce that was growing and some tomatoes, etc.  The good news is the kids absolutely LOVED looking for deer foot prints!

Krista also had them bring out their journals to work on for half of the time.  She told them to pretend they were detectives like Jack and Annie!  We should definitely encourage the teachers to do that moving forward, the kids really got into it and were walking around doing "research" for their journals."

Vanessa Scocchera wrote

"We had a special time with the 3rd graders. Mrs Gates together with Mrs. Teismann organized a soil science investigation. Despite the cold weather we were able to collect samples of soil from the garden and around the garden. We also collected some material from the wood chip mountain next to the garden and observed as the top layer was different from the material at the core bottom of the pile. The latter was darker, with more small particles and had that nice humus smell you can find while walking in the woods. The kids were then able to answer all kinds of question about their soil samples (color, texture, smell, composition) and look at samples with a loupes and magnifying glasses. They were all saying - Woooow!!- fascinated by their ability to see very little things. Then before heading to the class we stopped at the wood chip mountain again to feel the difference of temperature from the top of the wood chip pile from its core caused by all the transformation happening during composting, and we got another - Woow it is much warmer !!- ".

Those are just a few examples of our rewarding educational outings in the garden with students and teachers.

Preparing for the Winter

Sounds like a normal thing to do for this time of the year or even earlier, but we are having extraordinary high temperatures and our eggplants, tomatoes and summer squash are still producing a little despite the drought.

But we started to prepare for the winter some beds. In the first few weeks of school the children harvested all the pumpkins, the watermelons, the sunflowers and corn, so we were able to clean up those.

It was looking like a super hard task for the garden volunteers to till all the big crops, but the Cincinnati Slow Food came to our rescue. The 25th of September was the National Slow Food Day of Service and a group of volunteer from the Cincinnati Slow food came to help us till the beds and enjoy some food at the end. For the ones of you who are not familiar with this organization "Slow Food is a no-profit global, grassroots organization with supporters in 150 countries around the world who are linking the pleasure of good food with a commitment to their community and the environment".


Cincinnati Slow Food, thanks for helping our school garden!

Celebrating the end of the harvest season

We had such a good time teaching children about harvesting, seeding, composting, etc.
Our Wilson Garden table had a great success. We were at the Wilson Fall Festival selling: seeds harvested and packaged in recycled paper by our students; tickets to raffle the 8 pumpkins harvested by the students in our garden; very nice gift bows made out of recycled paper by Diana Reynolds; and garden alphabet and message stepping stones with paint donated by GREENER STOCK.

 All of this thanks to the enthusiasm of teachers and students and the time donated by our Garden Committee volunteers (and their patient husbands and kids): Alisha Molloy, Diane Reynolds, Kirsten Stilgenbauer , Jennifer Donnellan,  Rebecca Sievers and Susan Prince.


We also shared the table with Cassandra Farm at the last day of Anderson Farmer's Market, in the company of David Lindquist owner of Cassandra Farm and our gardening knowledge source/main Wilson Garden project helper. People were amazed learning what we have been doing at Wilson Elementary and were more than happy to buy our products to support the garden.

An Art Contest for our Wilson Garden Wonder Logo

Thanks to the Art Teacher Kacey Watkins all the kids from 3dr grate to 6th grade participated in a contest to create the Logo for the school garden.

Each and everyone of the drawings were very tender and passionate. It was very difficult for the Garden Committee to pick one. So we selected 3 drawings and we let the kids chose the one. The winner is a a six grader and as a reward she won a Pumpkin grown in the garden. 
The logo tells you everything on how much the students love this garden.
We will soon post a slide shop of all the other drawings, keep checking on the blog in the coming days.

Harvesting is fun and tasting is delicious

Wilson students are back in the garden. Under the supervision of me, Kirsten Stilgenbauer, Alisha Molloy and Jennifer Donnellan the kids successfully and happily harvested the summer produce (tomatoes, summer squash, basil, pumpkins, water melon, eggplants, carrots sunflowers, lettuce seeds) 

and seeded the fall beds.

Many kids for the first time tried some of the veggies that they always believed to be not interesting to them. They found them surprisingly super delicious.


With the help of the teachers they learned all about corn, pollination, composting, plants needs, good and bad insects, wildlife visitors and more.


This fall the class involved in the Wilson school garden are 1st grade, 3rd grade, 4th grade. The 6th grade will be taking care of composting.

Ohio State University Buckeye Lady Beetle Blitz 2010 completed!

The last week of August we completed the second part of the data collection for the Buckeye Lady Beetle Blitz 2010 in our school garden. This time we were not so lucky. No ladybugs were collected in the August sampler, only many other insects. The researchers of the University lead by Dr. Mary Gardiner, will let us know what insects they will find on our samples besides the ladybugs we collected in June. 
I'm very proud of our little group of young Wilson students being involved in their first University research.

We were also mentioned on the Ohio State University - Agricultural Landscape Ecology Lab Blog, read below and click on the link.


The Agricultural Landscape Ecology Lab: BLBB August Sample: "Volunteer Cathy Roe's garden The Men's Garden Club of Youngstown Youth Garden Wilson Garden Wonder The buckeye lady beetle blitz has two sa..."

Latest update on the impact of school gardening on child education

The National Foundation for Educational Research in UK, recently released a report on a research conducted by the Royal Horticultural Society on the impact of school gardening on learning. The results are amazing and very well explained in this report. It is worth to take some time to read it (click on report to open the document).

Diana Reynolds and her daughter Isabelle built and installed for us a Garden Loom!

I big "Thank You" goes to Diana Reynolds and her graduated 6th grader Isabelle Class 2010. 
Being super helpful during the summer was not enough for them.
Today I went to the garden and Diana was there working on something.

She had this idea for a long time, and sure she put it in place with the help of Isabelle.
They built a Garden Loom for the Wilson Garden Wonder.

We now have a this wonderful Garden Loom where the children can wave grass, weeds or recycled colored strings to produce a beautiful piece of art that can be used by birds in the spring to build their nests. 

The children can make as many as they want weaved pieces that will then decorate the fence during the white winter.


Diana dug the holes for the loom's posts and.......

 ..... a very very young girl put her final touch for a few minutes with tools and why not bare feet, making sure the hole was deep enough and ready for the concrete.


Excuse me! Never miss an opportunity of playing in the mud!

What is ready to be harvested by the children in the second week of school

Sunflowers

Water melons

Pumpkins

Yellow summer squash

Italian Zucchini

Basil

Carrots

 Eggplants

  Tomatoes (red and yellow of all shapes)

Lettuce seeds

It is definitely fun!

Wilson Garden Summer Wonders

A day of rest, just to admire the beauty of our garden.