Volunteers Add Four Beds to Claypit Vegetable Garden

The text below was submitted by Green Team member Katrien Vander Straeten.

On Saturday, May 7, Deane Coady, second-grade teacher at , welcomed volunteers to help her add four more beds to the school vegetable garden. Green Team members ferried compost from Paul Langner and Barbara Buell’s house to the garden site where the DPW [Department of Public Works] had already delivered a large pile of loam.

Encouraged by the cheers of spectators of soccer and baseball games on the nearby fields, four Girl Scouts, including Alex Beer working on her Bronze award, power-tooled the four beds together using locally grown and milled white pine delivered to the school by Coady’s brother. 

The wood was paid for by a grant from the Wayland Public Schools Foundation. Penny Beer oversaw the drilling, Coady coordinated the placing and with help from students and parent volunteers – and goaded by the thunder – the beds were filled.

One of the beds will be home to the Three Sisters – a companion planting of corn, climbing beans and squash pioneered by Native Americans. Cody will refrain, however, from putting the customary rotting fish in the planting hole. Her choice of fertilizer is the compost that the school will produce on the spot.

The expansion of the Claypit Hill School garden is part of a pilot program to implement onsite kitchen and cafeteria composting of food wastes, to begin in fall 2011. The Wayland Green Team, under the direction of Molly Faulkner, spearheaded this program. Faulkner said that it will “help the children to develop the sense of community, caring and respect for each other and our earth that composting requires.” Once staff and teachers and children are comfortable with the expectations and new systems, the Green Team will help the other schools implement onsite composting.

Faulkner added that volunteers are needed for building the permanent wood and steel mesh compost bins this summer, during the week of July 12-15. Materials will be paid for by funds received from Whole Foods’ 5 percent program. Volunteers will also be instrumental, during the first two months of the new school year, in helping the students get the hang of separating their valuable food waste from recyclables and from “real” waste when they finish with their lunches. Visit the Green Team website at www.waylandgreenteam.org or check with Wayland Patch for more information on this and for volunteering opportunities.