Kingsley to Establish Food Garden on Campus

The Kingsley Charter School has been awarded a $1,000 grant from BRITA to establish a food garden on campus. 

Kingsley competed against hundreds of schools across America for the grant by submitting an idea to make the school more sustainable. The grant is one of 50 FilterForGood Eco-Challenge grants of $1,000 each awarded by the water filtration company.

Kingsley staff member Carol Lincoln, who has led the Kingsley School Master Gardener team since its inception in the spring of 2009, wrote the application.

The focus of the application was to develop “an organic food garden to enrich the learning process in the areas of math, science, social studies and health.”  The application proposed that planning and tending a food garden would lead to critical experiences in preparing and eating the food that would give the students a foundation for future processes in reasoning. 

The garden site is an undeveloped area between the school building and gym.  It receives more than six hours of sunlight daily and is in a flood plain with a central drain. The site will have 10 raised beds for growing organic vegetables, 10 worm bins, seven rain barrels, two blueberry bushes, two fruit trees, perhaps a grape vine and paved walking paths.

The proposed beds are called really raised beds and are large growing trays on legs.  The benefits of the raised beds are that the occasional heavy downpour will not wash away soil or plants, there will be fewer pests than in a garden on the ground, and the height of the beds will ease the work of planting and harvesting from plants grown in a traditional manner.

The educational purpose of the garden is to teach students valuable lessons such as:

• Determining the mature size of a plant and calculating plant/tray ratio.
• Learning the process and requirements for growth of a plant.
• Studying cultural diversity and/or history as they research recipes for preparing the food.
• Discovering good environmental practices as they use garden waste to feed earthworms. 

The site is very visible to the student body.  As students go to physical education every other day, they will pass the healthy food they are growing. 

The price tag for all the components of the garden is $2,365.  The BRITA grant was awarded to Kingsley on good faith that the school community would raise the additional $1,365 to complete the project.  

The BRITA grant money will be used to build the 10 grow tables, said Amanda Hensley, a parent member of the Kingsley School Master Gardeners. “We have the labor, we need materials,” she explained on an overcast, damp and chilly afternoon last week at the charity garden at St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church on North Peachtree Road.

With the money now available to buy the materials, Kingsley parent volunteers have scheduled a workday on Saturday, April 16 from 9 a.m. – 1 p.m. to assemble the tables. The tables will be used year round and will be open to the community in the summer.

The food garden project is Phase II of the development of two major hands-on garden areas on the campus.  

The other garden area, a Learning Garden, was completed as Phase I in the first year of the School Master Gardener program’s initial year of operation.  The Learning Garden is an outdoor space that includes a shade garden, butterfly garden, sensory herb garden, raised bed and a work area with tables. 

The School Master Gardener team leads an active school Garden Club.  It has 64 members and is the largest after-school club at Kingsley.  The club’s activities cover a variety of gardening and environmental topics, including soil quality, the water cycle, vermiculture, seeds, birds and bulbs. 

A gardening opportunity at Spruill Art Gallery

Pattie Baker (a.k.a. Sustainable Pattie) is looking for a hands-on leader and team to take ownership of a new gardening opportunity to help those in need.

This opportunity is at the Spruill Art Gallery where Hope Cohn, the director, would like to reinvigorate an old garden in back of the historic farmhouse. The garden had been tended by master gardeners, but they moved to a new location when the space was scheduled for development a few years ago.

That development is not going to happen now, and Hope would like to restore the garden into a space to grow food for those in need. The idea is for the growing space to be incorporated into a sculpture garden.

Pattie, Hope and Bob Lundsten, who also is helping with this project, have a two-week window to find someone who is looking for a leadership opportunity in community gardening and urban agriculture to take on this project. Without such a leader stepping forward in this short window of time, the garden concept will be dropped and the entire space will be turned into a sculpture garden.

To learn more about this opportunity read Pattie’s blog at http://www.sustainablepattie.com/2011/03/spruill-art-gallery-garden-yes-or-no.html.

You can also e-mail Pattie at Sustainablepattie@comcast.net.

Some good dirt: Diana Wood says the greenhouse at Brook Run Park is literally overflowing with plants for the April 29-30 Community Garden plant sale.

Among the goodies: Tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, basil, forget-me-nots, alyssum, black eyed Susan, strawberries, raspberries, purple iris, dogwood, marigold, artichoke, dill, onion, asparagus and Japanese maples. A high percentage of the plants have been germinated from seed using organic potting mix.

And some lucky shopper will win a raffle for a clay pot with a variety of herbs. The drawing will be April 30 at 5 p.m. You do not have to be there to win.  All the volunteers need for the raffle is a name, phone number or email so they can contact the lucky winner.

The sale will be at the greenhouse in Brook Run Park from 9 a.m. – 5 p.m. both days.

A banner announcing the sale will go up soon at the entrance to the park.