Tuesday, September 6, 2011

Welcome back and ready for a new year !

We are back from the summer holiday and student are ready to start making new discoveries in the garden. This summer has been very hard. The weather has been very hot and rainy so weeds overwhelmed the summer volunteers. But we finally have huge and beautiful sunflowers for the kids to harvest. There is plenty of material to learn about weeds, how to keep them in control without the use of chemicals and how the weather can affect the harvest. This year the USA have been battled with bad weather on all sides and farmers are feeling the brutality of nature. Food price may be on the high hand this year. There is a need for humanity to start to respect nature boundaries and limits and work on solving climate change. I hope to see many parents in the garden. Teachers are ready, student are ready.

Friday, June 24, 2011

Forget about the complicated food pyramid, just look at your plate

USDA's MyPlate - Home page



taken from USDA.gov


“USDA does not endorse any products, services, or
organizations.

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Weather was not nice with us this Spring

There is one thing we surely learned at Wilson Garden. We were able to water the plants to keep up with an extreme drought last year, we can build a nice fence to keep animals out of the garden, but we were not prepared to torrential rain this year. Just 2 days after we seeded our spring crops a torrential rain pounded on our beds for several days, washing away all our seeds. So unfortunately no harvest for the kids before the school closing.
For sure we cannot complain of what happened to us when compared to all the flooding and tornadoes damages suffered throughout USA during this spring. I would not be surprised if all this frequent and record droughts and rains will be linked to Climate Change once studied.
Kids are surely learning how difficult can be to grow food and thus appreciate it more.
Let's hope we will have an abundant summer harvest when the kids come back to school in August.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Brand New Fence Completed ! Thanks to YMCA and all Wilson PTA and Garden Friends volunteers

The week of Earth Day will be celebrated at Wilson Elementary School with a special garden fence inauguration at 2 p.m. Monday, April 18.

Author Nancy Orlando and illustrator Debbi Kern will join the students and spend time talking to them about their writing experiences, their book “A Garden! A Garden!” and the children will get to make one of the garden critters masks.








The hard work, dedication and support of the Wilson parents, the Wilson PTA and Garden Friends made the fence a reality.

Come back soon to check some pictures of the inauguration.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Lets Move! Launch Anniversary Speech To Parents

A winter surprise: a new compost bin and a new 10ft tall fence

The garden committee has been pretty busy with the garden during the winter.

In the fall we won a YMCA Healthy Living mini-grant of 2500$ to build a so much needed tall fence to keep the deer out of our garden.
We applied to all the building permits, including a zoning appeal with the Anderson Twp. BZA.
We were thrilled when the BZA approved the variance for our fence.
Now that we have all the permits  we can finally build the 10ft fence that will keep deers, raccoons and other creatures away from our veggies.

The construction will soon begin in the first week of March.

When one day I went quickly to look at the garden under the snow in the first week of January, I noticed a brand new compost bin. I asked around from where it was coming from and not having found the donor yet, I just want to thank here the mystery compost promoter.

I'm sure the kids will be so happy to receive all those improvements for their garden. A young student already stopped me in the school recently and asked when the garden was going to start again as he was getting tired of those cold long winter days inside the school.

We are counting the days to spring...